Color Environment

so I guess KH2 doesn't actually come out until today (3/29)... with an entire evening of wasted time ahead of me, I spent about six hours on this. it's the tutorial I had been planning on making after the "Drawing with Sincerity" tutorial. I'm not even sure if this makes much sense. I wrote it in a bit of a daze. but besides dynamic posing and characterization, color environment is about the only thing I can technobabble about.

Summary: This tutorial will teach you what color environment is and how to manipulate it in your work. The tutorial covers why balance is important to a piece and how to integrate colors in a piece. It also covers the basics of color temperature and how to apply it to a piece.


I'm very exhausted. I think I'll go eat something now. I aplogize for the size of this tutorial, both in height and file size. since this is a tutorial with an emphasis on COLOR, I had to keep the quality as large as I could. I also would like to apologize to *jennadelle for using her photo of a glowstick. it's a good photo. did I mention I'm tired.

what's really funny about this tutorial is that I took a class in college last semester on color theory. didn't learn jack from it, except that I loathed oil paint. everything in this tutorial I've learned from an article I read sometime in high school (I think as a sophomore or junior) on color temperature, and from studying *balaa's art (I don't know why, but way back when she was primarily at TLKFAA, the way she unified color in her pictures was like a divine revelation... this girl is god of color environment, and she's really successful because of it). this tutorial is really in response to all the idiots out there who have ever made a "how to color in Photoshop!!11/" tutorial, and told people to shade with black and highlight with white, or use the dodge and burn tools. to all those people: I hate you. please die.

Further Reading:
Color Temperature - This is a very technical article about color temperature, or "white balance", mostly geared towards photographers. but it has those nifty graphs.
Punchstock - Source of all the photos... stock photo websites are nice if you want to portray a certain environment, and aren't sure how it might look like in reality. references are your friend.
Color Theory - Your Wiki rundown on color theory. Rejoice, rejoice.