“Pretty Art” and superficial appeal

pollums:

Okay prepare yourself for a long post anon ahahahah! Sorry!

I have this term that I’ve been throwing around for a few years to refer to a very specific tendency in art- I call it “Pretty Art”. 

Pretty Art in its most simplest explanation is when an artist spends SO much effort on making the subject of their art “pretty” that the quality and progress of their work actually suffers.

There’s no way to cite examples of what I mean without insulting a whooole lot of young artists that you probably know and love, but it’s not like I’m exempting myself from this tendency. I think many of us, if not ALL of us, are guilty of this tendency so long as we’ve been exposed to the false idea that superficial beauty regimens determine the value of a person and have at some point in our lives transposed this horrible idea onto our art without realizing it.

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This is a good post. Read it. I felt uncomfortable reading it in the way one does when they know it applies to them and they have a lot to work on! Which I do.

Palette/Color tutorial by neonnoodle

simonist:

[This is off one of Neonnoodle’s posts from SomethingAwful, but it’s such a useful technique I wanna repost it here.]

Here’s one approach I’ve found, which is based on the gamut mask idea, but a little simpler and tuned to working in PS:

1. Start with three color swatches: a red/magenta of some kind, a yellow of some kind, and a blue/cyan of some kind. They don’t have to be crayon-box “red” “yellow” “blue” — the nice thing here is that you can decide how warm or cool you want the overall cast of the color to be. So, for instance, you could pick a cool yellow, a purplish red, and an electric blue. Or a very orange red, a warm yellow, and a greenish blue. Or even substitute green for blue. Experiment here. Even colors which are completely hideous will mellow out, so don’t be afraid.

 

2. Draw your 3 swatches in a tight triangle so that they are bumping up against each other in the center. Then use a smudge tool with scattering on for a blender, and blend the edges of each color into each other:

 
(I also had pressure set so I wouldn’t blend too hard, but that’s optional. Scattering is the important one.)

3. Now you have a neutralized color wheel. The closer toward the center you go, the more neutral the palette becomes:





(here they all are against 50% gray)


4. Now you can start establishing the values for the colors you might want to use. Use the L (Lightness) with Lab sliders on the color panel (even if you’re using RGB or CMYK color for your document) because “Brightness” (HSB) is a load of horseshit.



5. By the way, here’s what the color wheels from those other colors from the beginning would look like:



And one other with more swatches: