There is a common practice in digital painting these days of extracting the colors from a photograph in order to create a unified pallet. While this works quite well, as I’m been trying it I find it’s important to limit the amount of colors you pull from the photo to make sure the colors in your painting don’t get too busy. I have however discover that extracting colors from images of other paintings allows you to work with in that paintings color range. By no means should you just develop your pallets this way. If you don’t have experience with creating a color pallet I highly suggest reading “color and Light” by James Gurney. He does an excellent job laying out techniques for developing an oil painting pallet that translates easily to digital painting. Below is a speed painting study of a character I’ve roughly rendered with color pallets extracted from still life photos. I’m finding for limited, moody pallets, classic still life paintings of fruit make an interesting place to start. (although, be aware that blues are more uncommon in this type of painting.)
