How to Choose Colors for a Character (Values First, Color Second)

The slowest way to color a character is to finish the drawing, open the color panel, and start trying things. Alexandra Fintova, who teaches the Character Design Essentials Bundle on Twotap, makes every color decision before the real painting begins, and checks all of them in greyscale first. The result is that the painting stage becomes execution rather than a series of anxious experiments.

Contrast is how you point at things

Her reason for treating color as a design problem rather than a decorating problem is about attention.

"Working with color and value is a good way to lead the eyes to the most important parts of the character. The viewer's eye will be immediately drawn to anywhere with strongly contrasting areas."
Alexandra Fintova, in the lesson Color and Values from the Character Design Essentials Bundle

That reframes the whole task. You are not choosing colors you like, you are deciding where the viewer looks first, second and third. A palette that is pleasant but evenly contrasted gives the eye nowhere to land.

Color thumbnails: decide cheaply, in bulk

Her method is to duplicate the sketch four to six times and block flat color behind each copy, fast and roughly, with a pencil brush and no detail. Dominant colors only.

"Color thumbnails are good to have an idea how you will color your illustration. It will speed up your process and you can really spend time illustrating and not thinking about color choices at that stage."
Alexandra Fintova, in the lesson Color Thumbnail

She starts from whatever is already settled. For her sailor she knows the background is a sunrise over sea with a dock, so pink, blue and brown are fixed, and the open question is only what the character does against them.

Expect none of them to be right

This is the part that makes thumbnails work, and it is easy to misread as failure. After four versions she says plainly that she finds none of them perfect, yet the exercise has decided several things.

The beard will be orange. She had considered dark brown with blue, and rejected it because there is already blue in the sky and blue in the sea, so a blue character would sink into the setting. The shirt keeps a blue she likes. A gold and a skin tone get promoted from one thumbnail, a darker brown gets reserved for the pipe.

Thumbnails are not a menu you pick from. They are how you discover which individual decisions are load-bearing, and you assemble the final palette out of the winners.

The value check layer

Her single most portable technique, and she keeps it in every working file:

• Make a new layer above everything
• Fill it with a mid grey
• Set the layer's blend mode to Color

Everything below now reads as greyscale, so you see values with the hues stripped out. It answers the question color thumbnails cannot: is this actually contrasting, or does it merely look different?

She uses it live to settle the trousers. Light trousers stand out beautifully from the background, but she is not yet certain what the background will become, so she takes a darker greenish blue instead. The decision is made on value relationships, not on which swatch is prettier.

Crucially, the layer stays on for the whole painting process. Value drift happens gradually while you work, and a permanent greyscale toggle catches it early.

Save a palette, then feel free to ignore it

Once the colors are chosen she saves them as a named palette she can set as default and reuse across a body of work, which is how a personal style becomes consistent rather than accidental.

Her attitude to it afterwards is refreshingly loose. You do not need to use all the colors all the time. She will pull only the blues from a palette for one piece, or only one corner of it, or mix two regions. And if a color turns out to work better mid-illustration, she uses it without bothering to add it to the saved set. The palette is a guideline, not a contract.

Watch for values colliding, not colors

In one thumbnail she notices the skin tone blending into the hair and background, and this is exactly the failure the greyscale view is designed to catch. Two different hues at the same value merge into one shape at a glance, no matter how distinct they look up close.

She does not discard the option for it, noting she can separate them later with shading. That is the right call: knowing about a value collision in advance means you can plan the fix, rather than discovering the character has no edges after six hours of painting.

Nothing here is final

Fintova repeats it in both lessons, and it matters because the whole process only works if it stays cheap. These are starting points, not commitments, and anything can change while illustrating.

The point of deciding early is not to lock the painting down. It is to make sure that when you do change something, you are changing one considered decision instead of improvising the entire palette at the moment you are least able to judge it.

The sequence

• Fix whatever is already known, usually the setting
• Duplicate the sketch four to six times
• Block dominant colors only, quickly, no detail
• Harvest the decisions rather than picking a winner
• Check every candidate under a mid-grey Color-blend layer
• Resolve value collisions, or plan to shade around them
• Save the palette, then stay willing to break it

Alexandra Fintova takes a character from mind map through thumbnails, palette and value checks to a finished painting in the Character Design Essentials Bundle on Twotap.