Color and Light : Blue Buddies 3

Time for the monster! Today we are going to get through the fur phase and that'll get us all the way through from shiny to fuzzy. To start off let's get our reference back up there for the last time so we don't get too lost.

Hopefully you've painted up your Yellow bananas and Green tomatoes a few times by now and are pretty comfy with the color choices we make as we're manipulating our images.

Blue Buddies 1 and Blue Buddies 2 in case you'd like to start at the beginning.

To keep this somewhat simple here is our mantra before we start.

Base colors, Shadow colors, Light colors, Highlights, Bounced Lights, Sky Light, Occlusion.

There is going to be a little bit of a diversion but not too crazy.

SKETCH

BASE COLORS

Like the tennis ball the furry ball has lots of hairs coming off the sides of the silhouette so be sure to be expressive here and get fuzzy!

SHADOWS

To keep it simple let's break down the shadow into a few steps. We can treat this like a ball to start off. Going about halfway to black and a little bit cooler toward purple for the shadow color.

The fur kind of creates all these little shadows everywhere so I'm going to throw the shadows around the ball even up close the the light side.

Because I went pretty heavy with the shadow shapes, I'm going to come back in with the base color to kind of break up the shadow shapes and even go into the shadow side with that color because some of the hairs will stick out and get light, even in the shadow side. It might be helpful to remember how we treated the tennis ball for this in how the shapes are kind of broken up and have a more wider spread with the texture of the material.

LIGHT

Same thing on the light side. It's the usual sort of half moon shape but not perfect, the hairs are going to be spread around a little bit more leaving some room for the base color and the shadow shapes to poke through.

HIGHLIGHTS

The highlights are treated similarly to the light phase. The individual hairs in the light are going to pick up light. Trust your judgement here and if you're unsure where to put them take a look at your reference for help.

BOUNCED LIGHT and SKY LIGHT

OCCLUSION

And.... Done!

But wait! What about the eyes?!

I've left this out intentionally, haha! This is a simple shiny ball so I think you can handle it! Just remember our mantra and I think you'll be able to take it there with ease. Because the white has no color really you won't have to worry as much about color choices until you get to the bounced light and skylight, good luck!

Base colors, Shadow colors, Light colors, Highlights, Bounced Lights, Sky Light, Occlusion.

We are getting so super close to a finish and I apologize for making this study drag out for so long. Don't worry, we'll continue with the normal structure soon, but for this particular stretch I think it was important to slow down and really study these features in a broken up way so that we don't get super lost. It's a lot of material (wink, get it!) to cover so I wanted to be thorough. Our next step will be to take what we have and bring it to a finish.

If you want to go over how I made some of these color choices in this study you'll find a basic primer here.

Check out Blue Buddies 1 and Blue Buddies 2 in case you'd like to start at the beginning.

If you'd like to get started with color studies we've got yellow and green now ready to go!
Yellow Bananas
Green Tomatoes

If you need help getting started drawing, I highly recommend you head over to @jorgevandeperre's blog and start following along his lesson plans. @jorgevandeperre has over 30+ exercises to get started and is even giving out rewards to students who complete homework!

Thanks a ton, see you soon!