Quick Tip: Checking colour values in Procreate
One of the most important lessons I learned that elevated my illustrations were understanding colour values.
What is value? Value in art is basically how light or dark your colours are on a scale of black to white.
If you are not checking this when you make your colour decisions, you may end up with a piece that may have the values that are too similar throughout without enough contrast and it’ll just look off.
Here’s an example of my early attempts at a children’s book spread in late 2019.
I was just so happy I managed to draw that many things in one scene (ha!) but there was something off about it that I couldn’t figure out. It took me a few months before I realised (thanks to a comment from another artist), that I had not understood or considered values when choosing my colour palette.
Take a look again at the piece when it’s in greyscale/black & white. The piece essentially looks like a big blob of grey with little value contrast. You can barely see the main character (the merboy) whose tail is camouflaged against the corals. The supporting characters like the turtle and crabs are barely visible. And the corals on the right are all blending into each other too as there’s just no contrast to separate them.
Once I understood this, I always do a value contrast check of my piece before I finalise my colour choices.
Use the value decisions to inform your colour decisions. By understanding how to balance between light and dark tones, you can make better colour choices and create a stronger piece.
So how do you check the colour values of your piece? Watch this short video below where I demonstrate how to do this in a quick and easy way on Procreate (same steps in Photoshop) and some additional examples of colour values of my recent work.
I hope this was helpful! If there are specific illustration tips you want to hear more about, leave a comment below or drop me an email, and it may just be the next blog post I write.
