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[Balrith]

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You're not disagreeing though. I did say that the effect can be very stylized. Depending on the way these colors are used, the effect can range from very stylistic to just lending some good old tonal variation. Either way, done right, it doesn't look awkward. I'll post some examples.

brown red highlights


yellow and red highlights


green and yellows in dead master's hair


orangey yellow highlights are present in the hair of the maid that's turning back.


A few from Yuumei since she likes her colored lights.





And finally, there's Cushart's current style. Easily the most stylized coloring style in the bunch.

[NejinOniwa]

stop being such artsy pls i feel lost

[Balrith]

My bad. It is starting to get pretty off topic. I'll spoiler it.

[Chocofreak13]

@balrith:

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of the ones you posted, only black rock shooter,  yuumei and ahri have true black hair, the rest are brown-black. sorry to split hairs (pun TOTALLY intended), but brown has a much wider range it can be highlighted with.

also, of the Yuumei pics, i'd consider the third one to be more reflected light than a true highlight. the highlights in hair you see are the halo around the top, which isn't present at all in that pic. it's a beautiful picture, and a great reference, but I wouldn't count that as a true "highlight". (gawd I sound so art-school-elitist right now i'm so sorry)

ahri is beautiful, but having orange in black hair is, frankly, confusing. >: ?
also, black rock shooter is extremely stylized and I would not consider it the norm, given that each character works off a black/[colour] scheme. :\

[Balrith]

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one cardinal rule I can tell you is that highlights on black hair never change. other colours may show up differently in different coloured light, but black's highlights are always either white, blue, or purple (in the case of anime). anything else looks awkward (such as when I thought of using golden on black hair and my teacher told me that it'd look like there was honey in it).

Black hair with touches of red and yellow highlights is a pretty common stylistic choice, although in some cases that starts to fall into the category of color bending.

I would disagree with you, saying that if someone makes the choice to use those colours, it must be a rather stylized piece.

You're not disagreeing though. I did say that the effect can be very stylized. Depending on the way these colors are used, the effect can range from very stylistic to just lending some good old tonal variation. Either way, done right, it doesn't look awkward.

black rock shooter is extremely stylized and I would not consider it the norm, given that each character works off a black/[colour] scheme.

I did post a lot of pictures partly to allow for difference in interpretation.

For the third Yuumei picture, the highlight is a bright unsaturated orange. It is faint but present. It does cut out halfway across the hair but a highlight is a color. Deciding where to put it and how much to put is at the artist's discretion and depends on his or her interpretation of the lighting's direction and intensity and the emotion that needs to be conveyed. Misplaced highlight colors used by an unskilled artist look wrong because you can still identify them as highlights.

Colored lights on black hair are going to make the hair the color of the light like Yuumei's pics demonstrated. Colorize a picture of a person with black hair and that person's hair highlights will be the color you chose.

Ahri's orange hair is confusing when stopping to think about it. But, when looking at it with the context of the coloring of the rest of the picture, it looks fine. I find the ability to do that with colors a damn impressive thing.

Dead Master's hair is indeed part of her character design. The part of the picture that you should be focusing on however, is how natural Alphonse made her hair look. With the greenish sepia atmospheric lighting around Dead Master, that hair looks black. The yellow-green highlights aren't awkward. It's not as if had the hair been on another random character the colors would suddenly start looking wrong. The same goes for BRS' hair in the fifth panel where she has a dull bronze hair highlight.

Besides, what is the norm? You've already allowed for purple highlights and that is fairly stylistic. Just because something is less commonly used doesn't make it less valid.
Even if using other colors as the highlight isn't the norm, if it looks right, then the rule that black hair can only have white, blue, or purple highlights isn't absolute. Instead it might just mean just that white, blue, or purple are the the only highlight colors for black hair for the small subset of lighting conditions that the average artist draws.


Decent artists are expected to have a good grasp of how colors interact in all lighting situations. This can include even being responsible for learning how to color as if the picture has been through an instagram filter. Then there are some artists that manage to color in ways that even a filter can't reproduce. Many polished coloring styles depend on stimulating the viewer with extreme saturation and strange colors that nevertheless look correct. Not necessarily correct as in the sense that you might see it in real life, but correct as in the colors might be unexpected, but still make sense as a whole. That's one of the main things that make coloring so hard.

[DustiiWolf]

Wow! Such good insights and information! Thanks!

Topic Change: ShowHide

To change the topic, anyone know who this is:

Shes in the #os娘 tag on tumblr. Here's a comic of her:

I'm really curious.

Also found what appears to be alternate 8-tans:


They seem to be train related, a play on the UI's design style, Metro.

[Balrith]

Topic Change: ShowHide

To change the topic, anyone know who this is:

Shes in the #os娘 tag on tumblr. Here's a comic of her:

I'm really curious.

Also found what appears to be alternate 8-tans:


They seem to be train related, a play on the UI's design style, Metro.

Looks like an alternate Windows 7. Interesting.

http://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=4927

http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=29835140
^ can we get somebody that reads moonrunes on this?


A few excerpts

[Chocofreak13]

yes, she's an alternate 7 that came out around the time nanami was created. dude, i'm pretty sure some of those photos are in the gallery. >>;

@balrith:

Spoiler: ShowHide

i'm going off what I learned in art school and what I've seen in every comic/anime ever thus far. the fact of the matter is, when you have a character with black hair, 9 times out of 10 that's what you're doing. also,
purple

is

not

uncommon.

it's just a bit vintage by now.

if you want more references, have a look at this tumblr I found.
http://blackhairanime.tumblr.com

[Balrith]

Spoiler: ShowHide

purple

is

not

uncommon.

it's just a bit vintage by now.

Yes of course everybody knows that. I didn't think it even bore mentioning.

Besides, what is the norm? You've already allowed for purple highlights and that is fairly stylistic. Just because something is less commonly used doesn't make it less valid.
Even if using other colors as the highlight isn't the norm, if it looks right, then the rule that black hair can only have white, blue, or purple highlights isn't absolute. Instead it might just mean just that white, blue, or purple are the the only highlight colors for black hair for the small subset of lighting conditions that the average artist draws.

^What I said there was that the norm (blue, white, and purple) is the correct choice for most lighting situations that the average artist encounters.
Neutral white and blue lighting/normal daylight will probably make the highlights blue, white, or purple. Sunset-like lighting can easily push the highlight color towards purple. All three colors work pretty well for nighttime purplish or blue lighting as well. I don't however, think that these three colors are the only colors that are ever right for any lighting with black hair.
What about different colored lighting than the norm? What if it's a place with a grungy green lighting like the lighting around Dead Master?

highlights on black hair never change. other colours may show up differently in different coloured light, but black's highlights are always either white, blue, or purple (in the case of anime). anything else looks awkward.

An example of yellow highlights from the tumblr you provided:



Purple highlights in pictures like the Izumo you picked make the hair look like black/[purple]. Why is that different from Dead Master's green tinged hair? Especially when the lighting doesn't even match as well as the Dead Master picture. Just because the yellow green lighting is less commonly used/encountered and as a result harder to pull off doesn't make it less valid.


As a sidenote, actual anime is generally not the place you want to go for art and coloring advice. The animators need to pump out an episode each week and as a result, the coloring and art is usually the bare minimum. Of course I'm not saying that the animators are bad artists. Far from it. Illustrators and fanartists can make work of much higher quality but a big part of that is because they've got the advantage of time on their side.

That said, average quality of kyoani in particular is pretty decent.

edit: forgot to spoiler it.

[Chocofreak13]

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you say not to take advice from anime, and yet you admit that you're still getting used to colouring. so i'm not inclined to take the advice of someone who keeps debating me, either. ^^╬

tbh the pic you posted looks more like white to me, with the slightest tinge of yellow.

unless you're going out of your way to draw super-weirdly lighted places (like the planet of neon red lights or something), it's not what you'd *typically* do. also, by saying that purple was "fairly stylistic" you opened up the train of thought that it wasn't a colour one would normally encounter in this situation. I was countering that statement with my examples. by the way,

[spoiler]Just because something is less commonly used doesn't make it less valid.

[/quote]

I never said this. I said it wasn't what one would normally encounter. don't put words in my mouth.

I don't even know why we're debating this anymore, all it's really doing is serving to make me madder. I was initially offering advice to dustii, given you said that you were just getting started with colour. I've been colouring for years, and I was stating what had worked for me for all this time. evidently i'm not a good enough artist to make anything other than those colours work, but considering that was also the statement made by my PROFESSIONAL ARTIST TEACHER, I really don't mind.

i'ma take a break now. this is making me frustrated and I've had a bad enough day.[/spoiler]

[DustiiWolf]

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"Girls. Girls. You're both pretty." can we get back on topic now?

[Chocofreak13]

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well, we need a topic to discuss. anything in mind?

[DustiiWolf]

Anyone know who she represents? She was introduced in the Cloud Girl web comic.

BTW, Microsoft's at comiket. They went last year and they're going again this year.

Inori Aizawa: Comiket
Windows Navi+ Comiket 2013

[Balrith]

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Missed the party while I was at work.

Try taking a color picker to the tumblr pic and this is the range of the colors you'll find in the highlights.


Not really saying anything here. Just for the sake of clarity.

My opinion was that stylized doesn't necessarily equal less common when it's relative to other stylistic choices that fall under a single style. Anime style as a whole is a stylized way of representing reality. I'd considered styles that fell under the anime style to be anchored to this central "way" that things should be drawn. These styles are then differentiated from each other depending on their stylistic quirks. Some of these quirks are common, some are not. In the end though, these styles all answered to this central "culture" and their purpose as a stylization of reality. (Sorry for all the quotation marks. I'm finding it hard to come up with proper words for these concepts.) Purple black hair is a common stylistic choice in the anime style. In real life it would just be dark purple hair.
I was just saying green black hair is the same concept.

I hadn't considered that you could take the whole of the anime style and it's most common stylistic characteristics and sort of anchor that as "reality" or rather the "way things should be" and then count deviations from this median as stylizations.
It's an interesting idea.

I never said this. I said it wasn't what one would normally encounter. don't put words in my mouth.

I guess you meant the words "never" and "always" loosely.
Fair enough. Just wanted to make sure that was clear. We've been more or less on the same page about this for a few posts already anyways.


Choco I know you found this whole conversation annoying, and I'm sorry for that. Likewise, there were times when I got frustrated that my ideas didn't seem to be reaching you. But, on the whole, I did enjoy thinking through these topics with you.

Alright that's it. Nothing more from me on this subject.

[Chocofreak13]

.......*flips table*ragequits*

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 you said I claimed something was LESS VALID just because it was less common. I NEVER FUCKING said that. I just said it was LESS COMMON and thus not the NORM, which is what I was describing for reference for DUSTII, who was saying that he wanted protips on drawing/colouring, something I have experience in. LOOK AT THE TUMBLR. 9 times out of 10 you're going to encounter one of those colours, so to avoid confusing him, and GOING OFF THE WORD OF MY ART SCHOOL PROFESSOR, WHO HAS BEEN DOING THIS LONGER THAN ALL THREE OF US COMBINED, those are the colours you will use when doing someone with black hair. we ALL know anime tends to break the mould a bit when it comes to style choices, but for someone who doesn't use that colour ALL THE DAMN TIME, it makes more sense to stick to the colour that you KNOW is going to come out okay, rather than go off the deep end and risk it looking like you spread mustard in the character's hair.

I want you to know that you now frustrate me to no end and you have made this topic significantly less enjoyable for me by dragging this out. we're never going to agree on this and I get the feeling we may have caused dustii to regret bringing up the topic. now, at the risk of looking like an asshole, i'm going to walk out of here. when I see your face now I'm going to remember this and grind my teeth.

@dustii: her name is Ruri, and represents Windows Naviplus. she's really new, so I don't know anything more than that. no idea if she's a Madobe, an Aizawa, or someone else (given that she was hanging out with Claudia, Nanami, and the twins in the picture I have, i'd assume Madobe).