You have two choices with this lesson, watch me discuss the issue in the video below, or read the full text.

In my video lesson "A Study In Greens", I discussed how as a young child, you are quickly directed away from painting what you see or what you feel to painting what you know. The grass is green, and here's a jar of paint that says green, so use this paint to achieve success. But the truth is that real grass can be any one of thousands of variations of green, and even some colors that aren't green at all.

Here's another example. This rock if described would be described as grey. But when using the color picker, you can see different parts of the rock actually contains almost every color under the rainbow.

So to replicate this in our art, we can of course copy all of these colors in exactly the placement and proportion of our photo reference. Or we can use some shortcuts that can lead to the same richness of color but are more expressive. This is frequently called "Accidental Colors", or I've also seen it called "Color Vibration". But don't let the term accidental fool you, many times this color variety is very intentional.

The technique is to paint primarily with hues and values that represent the overall color of the object, but then to inject small, almost random colors into the painting, usually from the other side of the color wheel.

And this causes that color complexity that I described without muddling your primary color palette. This can be done in either 2d or 3d, and in fact was something I used all the time when texturing 3d props during my time at Pixar.

This technique was used by the Impressionists in the 19th century, you can read more about them here: Impressionism.

2D Accidental Colors

So when painting something in 2d like this rock

You use the main color of the rock, varying the value and hue slightly to add a little bit of color complexity, and then add every once in awhile some small touches of color from the opposite side of the color wheel. This adds more energy, variety and life to the rock, making it feel more real without necessarily going for realism. You can even add these accidental colors on a separate layer so you have complete control over how strong the effects is.

Here's another example from Bill Cone, who was a production Designer at Pixar.

This is using traditional pastels, and lets discuss the rock in the center of the image. It's a whitish grey rock, but has so many accidental colors. Now I don't know if he meant to do this, or if it's just a side effect of his process, after all, some of these colors are because he's using cool and warm light on the rock...

and some are hints of light bouncing from other colored surfaces.

But regardless of the reasons behind these extra colors, the end result is the same, a more vibrant color rich experience.

Here's some examples from the TV show arcane. Notice this blimp, while grey overall, actually has a large number of accidental colors that sort of average out to grey.

As well as the color picked color, I also included the same color but with their saturation increased. Notice the wide variety of hues in the blimp.

Take a look at this floor. Mostly tiles of orange and yellowish colors, and every once in a while a touch of blue, maybe to suggest a bright blue sky above.

Here's a tour de force in accidental colors.

If you simplify this image into its base colors, you'd get something like this...

3D Accidental Colors

Now lets look at a 3d example. If you're painting the texture maps in 2d or 3d by hand, and then applying the textures to your 3d object using UVs, then you can follow the same 2d technique as outlined before. But a lot of texturing I do in 3d tends to be more procedural, instead of painting details directly on the surface with UVs, I am using projected textures using triplanar maps to add the initial materials to my surface. In this case, I use textures like this one as a triplanar map. 

I take this map into my 3d package of choice, use it inside a Triplanar Map, And mix it with the main color of the object, using either Multiply or Overlay or Hue mode, and then reduce the opacity so it tints the colors slightly, not radically.

And here's the final result, without and with. You can see the subtle color shifts that happen.

Conclusion

A few final notes...

• While picking the exact complementary color usually works well, feel free to select any color or set of colors on the opposite side of the color wheel from your primary color.
• One thing that happens with a lot of bad color use, in my opinion, involves using equal amounts of all the colors, both primary and accidental. This can lead to a confusing rainbow effect with no cohesive color palette. So make sure you have 1 dominant color to a particular surface or material, then add smaller amounts of the accidental colors.
• This technique affects your local color, and then lighting also affects the final pixel color you see in your image. So keep that in mind when painting, if you're in 3d, this will happen automatically for you when your texture is lit with 3d lights. But if doing 2d, make sure your accidental colors are also affected by your painted lighting.

So give this technique a try next time you're painting something. Of course, you should use more of less of this technique depending on the style you're going for.

For example, my Megastructure project was supposed to be more scientific and sterile,

but for the Space Baroque project I wanted to go for something more lively, and you can see how adding a little extra color in the right places to your imagery can give it a lot more life without destroying your color palette consistency.

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