Digital Painting Tutorial Colour choices

So I felt like doing some little colour experiments with one of my 'old' pieces and thought I'd talk about my findings. Might turn out to be helpful to someone?

PLEASE NOTE: I am not formally trained at all, this is just my personal opinions and observations.

A little bit of context to start with: my character Clubs is quite a calm and friendly horse, except for the fact that she spooks at a lot of random things, so a bit of a double-sided/clashing personality. Although I would have liked to tweak the lines to make them softer, unfortunately I no longer have the file for this so there wasn't a huge amount I could do with the image.

Firstly, contrasting tone! A nice general rule is to put a pale character on a dark background or a dark character on a pale background. This is to make the character stand out so you can fully show them off. Of course this isn't a one rule fits all cases kind of thing however. Sketches can generally look quite nice on a white background regardless (as seen below) as it makes the colours pop. Also with full illustrations you'll want the character to be harmonized with the background and share some of the palette. You could also factor in similar tones such as pastels as part of your style, but even then for character art it's best to have a least a little bit of character-to-background contrast.

Secondly, colour schemes! I picked a few random options for this but my favourite choice would be the first one since it compliments the browns in the coat. The brown may also have worked nicely in a slightly different shade but as it is I think it's too similar and almost blurs the character. The green one looks fairly nice but to me it also seems detached since there aren't any green tones at all on Clubs, maybe if she had green eyes...? Anyway, picking a colour scheme that works for your character is pretty important and you need to think about two main things: personality and the character's palette. Ideally going for a colour that links to some part of your character's design should be your aim, but make sure not to go for something too similar that will wash out your character. Also with thinking about personality, colours can say a lot about the emotions connected to your character. Yellows for bright, sunny people, red for fiery tempers or adrenaline seekers, pink for kindness... I could go on quite a bit and this is also up to interpretation, some people give colours different meanings. 

And finally, cold-warm contrast! Now this isn't something I know a huge amount about, but I'll try to come up with something helpful and insightful. In this image Clubs has hints of pink shading, but has mostly cool accents. You can see(just about) that on the cool background the pink shines through a little more, and on the warm background it's the blue. However you can also see the the blue shading looks darker on the blue background, creating more harmony in the image. This is something you can play around with and the differences will be more noticeable when you add more variety of colour in your shading. 

 As Clubs is a pretty soft child, my original idea was to make the background pale to reflect her character and also to link the colour to her eyes. However looking back although it may have suited her, it wasn't a good design choice. On the second take I still didn't want to go too dark, but still wanted to go for a colour that would make her stand out. Clubs is a character that is mostly laidback but with sudden fears, so I felt a cool colour with a touch of warmth would carry that across and since I already liked the link with her blue eyes I figured a bluey purple would work. And then we get this! Maybe not perfect, but definitely an improvement.