Thanks Helm, another concise colour process description
That's brilliant Helm! Although I think your emotional reactions to the very dark and saturated primary hues are not universal. I never see yellow as equalling action, although I agree with some of the others you mention. You did say "for me" so this isn't a criticism, just an observations for others who want to use the same approach.
Actually, yeah. I started wondering to myself what, if anything, colours meant to me. When I was younger I had very definite associations, but as I've grown and worked more in art colours have become a lot more flexible to me. For instance, I used to hate yellow. It was sickly, vile, like vomit or urine. Green was soothing and appealing. Blue was cool, clear, pure. Purple was fluffy, warm, bright. Red, very hot, hard, dangerous.
But now for me the kinds of associations I have are more contextualised (usually with mixes of colours). If there's green shadows I find it a kind of romanticised alienating feeling, perhaps introspective feeling. I guess if I can expand those kinds of associations back to being more broadly associated with hues themselves, I might be able to make more interesting colour choices. Okay, I'm really just rambling to myself now.
I agree, EyeCraft, it would be an awesome challenge.
Your interpretation of the eye makes sense. It's frustrating because I know there's more information there to represent, but there's just not enough room to squeeze it all in. How I've done it in the past is that the most important descriptive detail wins the square. It seems, however, that it's more accurate when the average of the sum of details wins the square. Which makes sense because when a computer compresses the information, it doesn't care if it's an iris or a eye lash or a beard hair, it compresses it all the same.
Am I starting to get a grasp of how and why this works how it works? If so, it's just a matter breaking my old bad habits and applying this concept.
That's a really good question. The idea I've had is you basically approach it with the intent to average it (can be hard depending on palette... just average to value in that sense, as Helm remarked, as long as the value is right you should be right). Then you might accentuate particular lines, edges, or patterns of colour depending on what you think is important to the total structure of the piece.
I was curious, so I did a computerised average of the same parts and compared them to what I had done. The average on the eyebrow has a tonne of colours and is basically a huge AA fest, in terms of pixel art. I exaggerated the line a little more in mine, mainly because I thought it would work and it would keep the pixels cleaner.
The eye is a lot more interesting. I broke it up in to two halves and compared them. The averaged one has a much better sense of eyelashes and pupil/iris. I think I tried a little hard to hint at the specular in my one and it has weakened the sense of the eyelash and iris because of it. I think mine succeeded in suggesting the lines of the eye, however. The averaged one has bled even more of the darkness of the iris into the bottom row of pixels, and it's really given a sense of it. That's probably the biggest thing that I missed.
So yes, approach it like averaging, but pure averaging doesn't always give the absolute best results. Just think about the subject, and bleed things across pixels to either "grow" it in size, or bleed it out to "shrink" it.