Process: "Mars 2117" - Coloring (Patreon)

Hey friends, time to continue the walkthrough for my "Mars 2117" artwork! In part 1 , I showed you my process for finding the right composition, placing the content and outlining. Now, it's time to add colors!

Building a color palette

Obviously, we can't really avoid the color red in a piece of art that is about Mars. First of all, I looked at a couple of pictures the Mars Rover made, to see what the actual Mars colors look like. Most of the planet seems to be covered by a rust-red to yellow-brown surface. I'm extracting some of those hues and shift them into the red area a bit, giving them a tad more saturation. I want striking colors for the artwork, so they can vibe more. These are my basic tones that build the foundation of my palette.

Next, I need to find some spot colors that add to the palette, and create contrast. Because of the perspective and how the content layers are built, it's important for the colors to take an organizing role. That means: leading the viewer's eye and create a sense of depth. Especially the car and the rider should be different, I'm leaning towards my old friend purple here. Blocking in some colors can help you finding the right balance and contrasts.

If you're unsure about how to start your palette, try this:

Find a basic color that is the best fit for the story you want to convey. Are you doing a character design? Then think about what color represents the characteristics of that figure the most.

From there on, try finding one single additional spot color, that creates a little contrast to your first pick. Maybe don't start with a heavy contrast like a complementary red & green. Pick something that creates more harmony.

Now block in the basic colors by now going too far away from your two hues. From there on, develop that palette more and more. This way, learn to deal with different contrasts and hues until they are your friends. :)

This is what the Mars artwork looks like after adding all the flat colors:

In conclusion, there's three overall reasons for choosing this palette:

Environmental considerations (Mars = red planet).

To create a certain dramatic mood that underlines the overall storytelling (hostile environment; worn-down, Mad-Mad-inspired rusty look). This is very tightly connected to what the outlined content is telling.

My personal preferences and colors that make artworks look like "me" (more about using colors for your personal branding is coming in another color-based tutorial)

Going more into detail, here's some additional thoughts behind organizing the colors. The majority of colors is from a limited range, to make the color palette look consistent and more dense. There are certain "groups" though:

It would now look a bit boring to only have one or two versions of blue and only one red-orange. So I spontaneously pick different versions of the basic colors. The more busy I want the palette to look, to more far away I go from the original tone. The saturation stays almost the same, but I change the brightness and the hue.

Good to know: I don't look at light sources and shading at this point, but depending on your shading routine, you can of course pay attention here already. My personal approach is to look at the surfaces as if there was no light source at this point.

Creating an atmospheric perspective

Like I described in part 1 of the tutorial, there's layers of distance I make use of. To convey this distance and depth even more, I now want to soften down the more distant elements. For this, it's super helpful to create separate layers. In the screenshot below you see that I have separated the foreground with the car & character, the middle ground, the buildings and the moons/planets.

Between these groups, I place layers of "dust" that reduce the contrast between the groups. We all know from basic physics, that the more far away we see, the less saturation and the more bright are the colors. With this technique, I'm trying to simulate that. See below the difference between the versions on the left and right.

In the final version, I even increased that effect a lot more, as it helps not only with simulating a realistic distance, but also improves the contrast between fore- and background, and helps leading the viewer's eye.

Additional tip for controlling colors:

If you're not sure about your colors and want to tweak them a bit into a certain direction, you can pick the color palette and do a color adjustment. It's available in any app like Procreate of Photoshop. I'm using this all the time to make tiny shifts into a certain direction.

That's it for today - I'm going to address shading and adding effects in a later tutorial, as it's a very complex point and I'd like to focus on that in a more specific way. Patrons will be able to download the high res PSD of the final artwork soon!

Thanks for reading, and please leave some comments about what you'd like to dive deeper into, if you missed anything, etc. I'd appreciate your feedback very much!