little update, still not finished!
might give the skull some more breathing space on top.
Colors... hmmm. I like to decide not only which hues I want, but maybe moreso those I don't want.
This is a typical red/blue/cyan/magenta pallette. I basically avoid the greens. You can look at this in the rgb channels.
I usually try to get the 'white balance' right somewhere in the beginning. This might involve tweaks with channels etc.
I decide upon my valuerange, for the entire piece, and for the individual objects. It's good to use a gray as a substitute for black, and in a later stage use black or near black colors for the core shadows. The same is true for white.
I try to think of shadowshapes and cast shadows. The shape of the shadow area and the shape of the light area is very important I think, if you get those right then it's just a matter of dividing the zones into smaller planar breakdowns. Coarse to fine as usual.
Avoid high saturation colors, instead place more desaturate colors near them. Color is all about context. It's not that you can't use very bright colors, but everything is an antagonist. Positive shapes/negative shapes, soft/hard, bright/subtle, textured/smooth, etc etc. It's usually more effective to play out the antagonist instead of keeping pushing the intensity in a one way street. You'll run out of room to play with sooner or later. So it's good to pick a more confined valuerange and stick to it, saving the extremes for last.
Desaturate colors really make the more colorful ones shine, remeber then on warm hues, grays will appear cooler the more desaturate they get. On cool hues the more desaturate it gets the warmer it looks, so instead of painting a blue next to an orange, it's often better to just desaturate the shadow, and perhaps save the blues for the very coldest areas.
I said I avoid greens here, so where blue and yellows meet I put inbetween reds/magentas and peachy colors instead of mixing them together in a green.
Hmmm, I guess that's the most important things in this piece. Hope you gained a bit from it
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