I understand this might be a bit unorthodox, but I think this might be helpful to me in creation of my pieces.

My designs seem to do great... I have gotten kudos (or nothing, which is better then negative remarks) on the designs, so I'm staying away from that for the moment. My trouble seems to be with shading, color selection, and highlighting.

Here are three simple structures. I've chosen colors, and shaded and highlighted the way that came natural to me. I'd like to see how I might improve upon color selection for base, shading, and so forth... I understand this is hard to explain and is usually sort of intuitive, but if anyone has some tips on how they go about doing this and would like to share, I'd love it.

Feel free to edit or use examples.

I haven't been around to pick up any sort of edit ettiquette there might  be, but I decided to try to help a little anyway, on the colors at least.

The main problem that I noticed is that your midtones and highlights are very grey, and that you hueshift toward blue on the highlights.  You want it to be the other way around, especially with reds and yellows.

Assuming you were going for a nice bright red, the midtones and highlights should really be a slightly orangey red, with a nice pure red or purpley red for the shadows.  I tend to like a pure red myself.



For the yellow, you were making the midtones and highlights much too green.  You want to start with a bright yellow and then shift towards red in the shadows.

Of course, if you wanted a greenish yellow, then you need to make the shadows shift to blue instead of red.

So I've adjusted the color of shape one a bit to show more of a pure red.

Incidentally, I'd like to hear some thoughts on how some of you decide on the particular colors to use for your piece. Do you choose them before hand? During the work, perhaps? Is it an eyballed choice or is there a kind of formula you follow?



When I look at this piece, something doesn't look quite right about the shading. I've seen other pieces with a beautiful texture to the surface. This piece looks like a few loops of color to me, though I can see the effect that I want to attain, which is a nice smooth transition of shades. This is where I tried dithering to loose the loops:



I've also tried this to show a bit of texture so the thing doesn't look so reflective. This has not met with the best reaction with other projects, however. Comments and suggestions?

Oh, and happy birthday, by the way!




Edited by absinthelord - 17 January 2008 at 2:17pm