Computer Animation Arts

In light of your OGR feedback and Photoshop classes, many of you have been encouraged to think much  more creatively about the use of colour in terms of your 'concept art for animation'.  Animation loves expressive, expressionistic colour schemes, but putting effective combinations together can be a bit daunting.  However, if you want to accomplish worlds as rich and ravishing as the examples feature below, you should make use of this very useful Online Colour Scheme Designer - from which you can export colour swatches into Photoshop ready-to-use.  Just follow the export instructions on the original post and get stuck in.  It's high time you committed to colour.  I want to see some colour wheel fireworks!  Have fun!

When you're devising innovative colour palettes and ideas for texturing, this website might prove useful. 'The Colour Of' website creates impressionistic colour swatches from image searches resulting from a key word, i.e. 'Halloween', 'Parrot' and 'Coral Reef'. Annoyingly, the resulting swatch includes the keyword itself as part of the image, but, that aside, it's a quick way of getting ideas about colour up and running. For another useful site to assist in the design of colour schemes for effective character design etc. go here.

I happened upon this rather useful freebie - an online Colour Scheme Designer that enables you to confidently put together ranges of colours guaranteed to work together. Once you've identified the desired spectrum, you can export the resulting palette to Photoshop as a .AOC file. The .ACO file is used in Photoshop as a swatch . In Photoshop, you can add, remove and edit swatches by going to the preset manager (File->Edit->Preset Manager), or open up the "Color Window", by pressing F6, and select the "Swatches" tab. On the top right of the color window there is a small arrow, which will display a menu when clicking on it. Go to "Replace Swatches", open the color scheme, or click on "Load Swatches" to add the color scheme to the current color set. You should now be able to use the colors from the color scheme.