Pirate monkey and a pumpkin baby

Lunch hour doodles, testing to see if what I think I know about color is right. Andrew Loomis has an amazing book on painting (or else it's the one on illustration) that someone let me read, and the whole color thing just finally sunk in. I had values pretty much figured out, but every time I tried to translate that to color I would end up getting completely mixed up and turned around and have a page full of mud.

One thing that stuck with me out of that book was this that he said: You can't look around and be like "oh that table is burnt ochre, and that chair is alizarin red with some spring green toads on it," you look at things and identify it by primary colors - say "that table is yellow leaning towards orange, and darker in value and less intense in saturation," or "my hat is blue leaning towards purple, higher in value and totally saturated."

That helped a lot, because just to be able to trim it down and have a system for identifying colors in the world as they relate to the colors available to me in Photoshop is amazing. I don't have to look over there and try and scrub the slider thingies around to get the right color HOPING I'll maybe get something that doesn't look like crap... I can start with yellow and make it oranger, and then decrease the value, and then I have something that works pretty well.

There was also a bit in the book about how complementary colors lessen the intensity of each other when placed against one another, but colors that are neighbors on the color wheel will intensify the feel of the original color.

So in an attempt to apply these ideas, I tried to make Pumpkin Baby really intense, and pirate monkey not-so-intense but also not a complete swath of mud.