Failing at Color

 Hahahahahaha...

I had so many great words about being brave. I planned to quickly figure out some stuff about color theory, then post that here, and keep on posting things. But life is crazy, and I fear I might be too. There was some crazy, painful life stuff happening, and there was also just good old perfectionism. You see, I said that I wanted to post failures, but what I meant was that I would post failures, then immediately and hurriedly post how much I improved. That way it cancels out, you see. 

I suck at color. And painting, generally. Not like artistic humble brag suck at painting, I mean like some of my paintings legitimately look like a 13 year old messing with Microsoft paint to make their OC. Oh well, I said I'd post failures, so I'll post them.

Here's the story:

February-- "Ok, I'll just learn how to color things really fast."

Lol, it was so bad. The tree's alright, and the mountains are too, but I got so frustrated by the water and stuff that I didn't even paint a grass field or anything. 

Then I went to go try to figure out which colors I like. I collected a ton of different paintings I liked then tried to figure out what colors they use. I then learned that I liked all of them. All of the colors. So that didn't narrow it down at all. Hahaha-- I like saturated and desaturated colors, bright and dark colors, red through blue and back around through magenta to hit the entire spectrum. 

I tried a few more Pixel art pictures with color palettes I could find online, but I really wanted to try to figure out how to pick the colors myself, and understand how they worked.

So then I went down a nice deep rabbit hole. I found a free Wacom tablet on Facebook Marketplace (it was $5, but when I got there she just gave it to me!). And yet somehow the Wacom tablet did not improve my ability to paint with colors. 

I tried to paint again from reference, and it wasn't perfect. This time I used Krita (a free painting program).

I think it's ok, but it has a lot of problems. I think I over-blended on the ears and a lot of other places, and since this was my first time using this new drawing tablet, my brush control was very poor. 

After this painting, I went down a huge rabbit hole in my attempt to learn how to color (again, just to learn how to color so I could post something on this blog I haven't even shared with hardly anyone). I read multiple books drawing and painting. Everyone said that you need to first learn how to draw, really have a grasp on art fundamentals like perspective, value and shading, form, etc. So I thought, "well, I'll just do that really quick, then figure out coloring, then I can post the next page on coloring on the blog." 

As it turns out, it actually takes a long time to "have a grasp on art fundamentals". I learned about perspective, value and shading, form, line quality and control, shape, and composition. I checked out books, listened to lectures. I studied books on anatomy. I filled out 100 pages of a sketchbook in about a month. 

Anyways, I have a ton of essays I wrote in my spare time, all in my quest to write a small blog post about color to show that I understood how to paint. Haha, I don't understand how to paint. I've improved, but it's still pretty poor. I want to post those things I learned though later, just because I think it's interesting. I think it's good to put things out like this, because if I'm trying to be braver and practice publishing things I make, posting the bad stuff will be good for me.