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Choosing Colours When Painting Miniatures


Wren

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Colour theory is derived from ideas of how our eyes and minds perceive colour based on the physical make-up of the eye and the colour patterns of nature. Most of the colour theory books you'll pick up in a store will have a lot of stuff about custom mixing colours from a handful of basic colours. Mini painters buy their colours premixed, and few of those colours correspond to the artist colours the theory books will use, so that stuff is not particularly useful to a mini painter just trying to figure out what colours to paint a figure. But there are colour theory concepts useful in choosing colours to paint on a miniature.

There are a handful of terms often used in colour discussions (tone, tint, hue and some others) that I'm not going to bother with outlining. Honestly I forget what most of the terms mean most of the time myself. I'll just concentrate on the ones I think are most useful in a mini painting context.

Colour theory is based around the oranization of the colour wheel. I've included a very basic and crappy colour wheel I made up below for those who don't have one, or you can look at a more professional version. There's a link to a good colour wheel you can purchase at the end of this article.

colour-wheel.JPG

Neutral Colour

Neutral colours are essentially non-colours. They go with (or at least don't clash with) all colours. Black, white and gray are the pure neutrals. Some browns are also neutral. Generally colours like brown, ivory, taupe, beige and browned gray can be considered 'friendly' colours that will work harmoniously with most colour schemes. Neutral colours are generally NOT included on colour wheels or other colour scheme picking tools (including most of the schemes in the Color Index book mentioned below.) So you can use one or two of them as extra colours in your colour scheme, but too many neutrals is not much better than adding too many main colours.

Mini painters generally treat skin tones as neutral tones, but you can try to identify the basic colour in a skin paint and working that into the scheme - a skin paint that has a slightly yellow cast might look nicer with purple colours, while one with a peach (orange) tone would look great with blue.

Pure vs. Muted Colour

A pure colour is a true, bright colour. If you go 'man, that's RED' when you see it, it's probably a pure or close to pure red. A muted colour is one that is more dulled down - earth tones and pastels are both muted versions of a true colour, which for red would include reddish browns and pinks. You can mute a colour in a few different ways - mix in gray, mix in black, or mix in white (this is how you get pastels).

The other way to mute a colour is to mix in some of its colour complement, but I'll get to what those are in a minute. Generally if you use one muted colour on your miniature you'll want all colours you use on the figure to be at least a little muted, or it looks weird. So if you have a soldier wearing a khaki green uniform, you probably wouldn't want to paint anything else on the figure a really bright red, a rust or reddish browncolour would likely look better.

Warm Colours vs. Cold Colours

Colours with red and yellow in them are considered warmer than colours with blue or green in them. This is helpful to know because cool colours appear to recede to the human eye, and warm colours to move toward the eye. So the principles of highlighting and shading a figure to bring out its shape and three dimensionality will be most effective if you use warmer colours in highlights (yellow, ivory) and cooler colours (blue, purple) in shading recesses.

It is also helpful to have a bit of the temperature opposite in your colour scheme so it looks balanced to the viewer's eye. If your figure is primarily blue and green, even a few touches of a red or orange colour will help the colours harmonize. Note that colour 'temperature' is always relative, and is heavily influenced by the colours surrounding the colour in question. I've seen a Jen Haley piece painted in very cold purple and teal colours. She painted the gold NMM with a cold light brown with just a touch of yellow, but in the context of the other colours it still reads as 'yellow' gold and warm. Had she used a very bright and warm yellow, it would probably have overpowered the piece.

What is a Colour Scheme?

A colour scheme is a set of colours that you select for painting your miniature. Ideally you want those colours to look nice together, and to use them in a way that draws attention to the most important parts of the figure and its composition. Colour theory offers guidelines for how to choose colours that will accomplish those goals, but colour is still very much a matter of taste and there is no one colour or colour scheme that everyone is going to love.

I think one mistake many miniature painters make is using too many colours because they want the different parts of the miniature to stand out from one another, and they are trying to paint something that looks realistic. In the real world, although some of us might make an effort to wear matching shirt and socks, we aren't usually dressed so that everything we wear harmonizes with what the person next to us is wearing and the colours of the place where we're standing. For a visual representation like a miniature, a more compact and cohesive colour scheme is usually a lot more effective. Look closely at some well-painted miniatures and you'll probably find they have no more than 2-4 main colours and a couple of neutral colours, and you'll likely also note that the colours and neutrals used on the main figure carry through and are used on or harmonize with the base and scenic elements.

Generally colours are not equally represented on the figure. You might have one main colour that covers a large area of the figure like a cloak, then the second colour on the smaller area of the shirt and pants, the third colour on a smaller area still of the gloves and boots, and the fourth colour used very sparingly for gems and a pouch, with a neutral gray for the sword.

Complementary Colours and Schemes

A colour's complement is the colour directly opposite to it on the colour wheel. Complementary colours are very pleasing to the eye. Mixing a complementary colour into a colour mutes it. If the two are pure colours and mixed together evenly, the mix produces a neutral brown. As hobby paints are rarely pure colours, it can be a little challenging to find a colour's complement. The colour wheel can help with this, allowing you to see that a reddish brown is opposite a turquoise. If two colours is just two few, you can use two different complements for a four colour scheme, as outlined in Tetradic Colour Schemes below.

The complementary colours are:

Yellow <-> Purple

Yellow Green <-> Red Violet

Green <-> Red

Blue-Green <-> Red-Orange

Blue <-> Orange

Blue-Violet <-> Yellow-Orange

Red and green are sort of a special case as they are inextricably linked in many people's minds to Christmas. If you use a true red and true green together it will be very hard (though not impossible) to avoid a Christmassy look. Slight variants of the colours work fine and avoid the, however - pink and mossy green, dark red brown and earthy green and so on.

Triadic Colour Schemes

Another simple and very effective colour scheme choice is to use the three colour triadic schemes.

Yellow <-> Blue <-> Red

Yellow-Green <-> Blue-Violet <-> Red-Orange

Green <-> Purple <-> Orange

Blue-Green <-> Red-Violet <-> Yellow-Orange

Tetradic Colour Schemes

These are colour schemes with four colours, and really boil down to using two pairs of complementary colours, but with guidelines for which pairs. It's easier to look at these on a colour wheel, but I'll go ahead and list them.

Yellow <-> Purple + Blue-Green <-> Red-Orange

Yellow <-> Purple + Blue <-> Orange

Yellow <-> Purple + Green <-> Red

Yellow Green <-> Red Violet + Blue <-> Orange

Yellow Green <-> Red Violet + Blue-Violet <-> Yellow-Orange

Yellow Green <-> Red Violet + Blue-Green <-> Red-Orange

Green <-> Red + Blue-Violet <-> Yellow-Orange

Green <-> Red + Blue <-> Orange

Analogous Colour Schemes

These are schemes of three colours side by side on the colour wheel, for example red, red-orange and yellow. I don't think they're used a lot in miniature painting, and would generally be considered similar to monochrome schemes by many viewers.

Tools that Help

It's worth buying a good colour wheel, which should only cost a few bucks. The colour wheel is most helpful if it shows you a couple of different things. One is the muted versions of a colour. So it shows you both true green and then what you get if you add white, gray and black to the colour. When you look at that kind of colour wheel you can see that a lot of browns are at heart really red, orange-red or yellow, which you should consider when incorporating them into your colour scheme.

A good colour wheel will also have indicators for the different types of colour schemes I outlined above. You set the corner of one of the color scheme indicators on one colour and it will match up the other corners with other colours that colour theory says work well together. There are also some online tools you can use for this.

If you'd a whole bunch of pre-selected colour schemes, you might want to pick up a book called the [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Color-Index-Combinations-Formulas-Print/dp/1581802366/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-2353808-4988138?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187972325&sr=8-1]Color Index[/ame] by Jim Krause. It's about an inch thick and six inches tall with a white plastic cover, and you should be able to find it in the graphics section of most major bookstores. It's intended for graphic artists and designers. There are a few pages on theory spread throughout the book, but the vast majority of it is page after page of colour schemes based on historical themes, ethnic themes, pastels, on and on. To make the most of it, paint swatches of your paints on pieces of index card so you can hold the paint right up to the swatches that run down the sides of every page of the book and match colours exactly. I've seen other versions of this kind of book, so you might be able to find something similar if you can't find this book.

Helpful Links

http://www.tigercolor.com/color-lab/color-theory/color-theory-intro.htm

The basic colour wheel, overview of terms and concepts and graphic versions of the colour schemes mentioned above.

http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/tech13.html

A long and detailed essay of types of colour theory and harmonies that is part of an even larger discussion of the use of colour in art. Honestly I haven't read this myself in full, it's too much for me to absorb.

http://www.coolminiornot.com/article/aid/194

Chrispy, an art student, wrote a nice tutorial on colour over on CMON.

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Nice stuff, im busy working on something like this for my site (I have something now, but its more general on how I picked a scheme for a certain mini)

If possible can I use bits of it, but in my words etc? (but il credit you fully when it goes up, if you don't mind?)

I can't really claim credit for creating any of this, just for trying to explain it in a hopefully digestible way. Almost all of it I learned from other mini painters or art links like the ones in the article. So go ahead and use it as a source if it helps you matty. Though if you come up with a better colour wheel than my craptastic one I'd love if you'd let me use it, as I'd like to put this up on my website once I get it together.

FF - I spaced on there being an article section here now. Thanks for reminding me, I'll try to get it in there.

I'm glad people are liking this, thanks for the feedback!

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