Appreciation for a color palette critique I got last week

I posted a piece I was pretty proud of in here last Thursday... a fantasy landscape with a big castle. Someone commented that my shadows were all the same shade of purple, which made the whole thing feel flat. I didn't even notice, I was so focused on the details. So I went back and tried using a deeper blue for the darker shadows and a warmer brown for the ground shadows. Man, it made a huge difference. The castle looks like it actually belongs in the scene now instead of sitting on top of it. Has anyone else had a piece totally change just from one color shift?

3 comments

3 Comments

phoenixb341mo ago

Oh wait, so you're saying the actual trick is just making the shadow darker than the surface color, not necessarily changing the hue? Like if I match the local color but go darker, that would work just as well?

drew_reed621mo ago

Yeah but see I kinda disagree with that whole temperature shift thing... sometimes it gets overdone. If you make shadows too blue or too warm they start looking like colored light leaks instead of shadows. What you did with the deeper blue and brown sounds more like value shifts than temperature shifts, which is actually the real trick. Most people get caught up in color temperature but really it's about how dark the shadow is compared to the light. The purple shadow thing is super common though, I did that for years until someone told me to just use a darker version of the local color instead of defaulting to purple. Your castle probably reads as grounded now because the shadows match the actual surfaces instead of fighting against them

beth_reed1mo ago

Big castle piece" - I read somewhere that artists use temperature shifts in shadows to add depth, sounds like you nailed it.