Bernardo Lovelock- Colors

For anyone who's serious about coloring your drawings with colored pencils (or crayons), this is basically how I planned Bernardo Lovelock's colors. We went through a similar process with the Christmas Toon Patrol drawing, but of course there wasn't any shading in that one...

I used Prismacolor brand colored pencils, which are nice but kinda limited (unlike Crayola).

Basically, what you want to do is have an image of what colors you want in your mind, and test out one of the pencils or crayons to see if it fits.
First, you'll want a base color.
Then you'll want a slightly darker shade of the first color for shadows, and an even darker one for the darkest of shadows.
And maybe a lighter shade for highlights.

Unfortunately, I can't really tell you what colors I used beyond what you see here, because I got so excited that I started using colors intuitively without testing them first. All I can tell you is that I hardly used any blues and no purples whatsoever out of a 120 crayon set...

One thing I discovered is that Crayola crayons are so vivid and saturated that there's only way to tone them down in any way and create the deepest of tones: use a contrasting color. Instead of using a darker blue for the jacket, I used reds, greys, and even black to get a richer color.

One strategy I used consistently is that since I wanted to give the impression that there was some sort of big roaring fire, most likely a fireplace, somewhere to the left of him and slightly above, I wanted to have yellows fall on his left side. I also have yellows emanating from the key to make it look like it was glowing slightly and draw attention to it.
Because vampires are so strongly associated with the color red, because of their blood-drinking, I decided to make all the shadows have some shade of red in them. Even the lightest of shadows on his face and neck, which I was determined to keep as close to white as possible to keep his face visible, are colored pink.

I actually got the idea for pink shadows from this particular drawing: [link]

I'll probably come up with a digital color reference, for the sake of standardization...

I'm absolutely in love with colors, and I love mixing them around to create beautiful images.