Gray is the king of colors!

With its help that you can achieve such a fashionable garish brightness of colors. But even if we are not talking about AI girls with gray skin and pink hair, gray plays an important role in the most trivial realistic objects.

Its main feature is that it takes on a color of a complementary value. That is, if you paint gray on yellow, it will seem blue. On pink, it will seem emerald. On blue, it will seem warm. This is one of the cases when the perceived colors is not such a combination in reality, and it is very important for the artist to notice these features.

For example, the greenish gleam of the "bug's back" on this egg is made in gray. When I tried to introduce green, it looked too bright and eye-catching.

Here are some tips on using gray:

— If you want to make a soft, ashen shadow, shift the main color to gray while maintaining the white balance. It is important that the color does not go down and the gray mixed in is not too dark.

— Remember that on a dark background, bright colors are not really bright. The highlight that looks blue on the egg is actually gray-violet. If you overdo it with the brightness of the colors, the naturalness is lost

— If you want to achieve a sense of brightness, playing with gray, you need to choose the right tone. In the palette screenshot, I showed the difference between the main color of the egg and the color of the shadow with the addition of gray. Note that between these two colors there seems to be a visual vibration, some tension. This tension is what we need if we want to achieve a sense of powerful color brightness.

The tension is achieved by correctly balancing the tone in relation to the bright color. The closer the gray is in tone to the color, the higher the feeling of tension.

Be careful with this tool if your picture tensions in unexpected places without any stylistic reasons - this causes unpleasant sensations in the viewer.

P.S.

And another mysterious egg as a bonus :)

By Vera Velichko

CEO of Owl Studio