it does look like watercolor!
and gosh I still cant get over how charming he looks here <33
I should repay you sometime ;w;

All I see are mistakes, but what that means is "I can't paint like you yet." X3

All I see are mistakes, but what that means is "I can't paint like you yet." X3

I like how you paint! Plus im a novice at this, so painting like me wont be a good idea, im trying to paint like all the artists you've been showing me anyway x)

Nice sabretooth tiger Also, did you paint a skull on his arm by accident?

It just sorta happened, didn't it?

Love these colours, man! It's been a while since I visited FA and looked at people's art, so it's great to see how much you've improved since last time.
Both your palettes and anatomy seems a lot more... coherent? Your style is still wonderfully free and impressionistic, but slightly more tight. It looks really good!

I'm... absolutely flattered. A lot of my more recent pics I've kinda had you in mind...

What half a year of life drawing will do to you! I honestly lost my skills in construction of the figure for a few months, after drawing so fast. X3 Yeah, I've not only started studying color theory in earnest again, but devised an entirely new system of color notation. I keep meaning to explain it on here someplace, but first I wanna keep using it and see if it actually works. (As a tetrachromat, I'm never sure how the color will come off to anyone else...)

Go for it! I'd love to read your thoughts on colour!

Your colours look fine to me! If you use regular ol' paint with regular ol' pigment, I doubt it'd make much of a difference to us boring old trichromats. How'd you figure you're a tetrachromat, by the way? Did you get tested for it? If I suspected anything of the sort in myself, I’d get my vision tested faster than you can say EMR!

Speaking of which. Initially, I'm extremely skeptical to the concept of human tetrachromacy. Not talking about seeing/perceiving colour differently here, but tetrachromacy in the sense of having four sets of (presumably, M, S and a double set of L) cones. I’d think it extremely rare if present at all, and highly unlikely in people without two X chromosomes. I am of course very open (and excited!) about the idea of tetrachromacy in humans. I’ve watched documentaries and read articles online, and so on and so forth, but I still have a very hard time finding any proper research on the subject. If you have any recent publications or information on the subject, I’d love to have a look!

Okay. You know how most color wheels are arranged around purposes? RYB for pigment mixing, RGB for additive color, CMYK for subtractive color, and YKRYGB for the perception of color in human rods and cones?
Right. None of these wheels take into account the psychological perspective of colors - Orange is such a tiny color on these color wheels but such a powerfully unique color to the human mind that we invented it before we even needed it (in Medieval England, before anybody had seen the Orange fruit, they called the color "Yellowred," because they knew this color was so identifiable and necessary), and we lump so many different identifiable shades under the umbrella of blue (blue contains the confusingly widest gamut of hues of any currently defined color, and what I find fascinating is that we subconsciously consider blue a shade of gray, going into and against black and white, and a neutrally safe color for all occasions, like that kid whose father never told her the color "blue," and asked her innocuously what color the cloudless noon sky was, she said "white").

So I'm trying to invent a color wheel that defines HOW colors OPPOSE each other in the BRAIN. More for the designer or painter than for the pigment-mixer, something about how a color scheme will be perceived by a viewer.
Experimentally separating the color wheel against four primary hues, Red, Yellow, Cyan and Ultramarine, according to how they oppose each other on a psychic level, I realized that if I added in the secondaries - Orange, Green, Blue and Magenta - this makes a wheel of eight colors with the hues polarized according to perceptual compartmentalization and opposition. Divide that FURTHER - Red, Vermilion, Orange, Yellow-Orange, Yellow, Chartreuse, Green, Blue-Green, Cyan, Cyan-Blue, Blue, Deep Blue, Ultramarine, Violet, Magenta, Crimson - and you've got sixteen. You can keep dividing this almost infinitely, and finally a wheel gives full range to the spectrum of blues that exist that your mind has been glossing over. Ideally, the cyan and ultramarine should be as not-blue as possible.

And even better - a wheel of eight and sixteen can be divided INFINITELY against color schemes, being a power of two - something the systems predicated on threes don't have. Red-Yellow-Blue and Cyan-Magenta-Yellow and Red-Green-Blue are all split complimentary color schemes in this system - solving my puzzlement over how those three color combinations can appear related in the human brain while giving biased admixtures while still preserving their neutralizing power - and explaining why the human brain made them into notetakers.
And as icing on the cake, i created a system of color shorthand whose rules I have yet to formalize, so now I can write down an entire color scheme's relation to itself on pencil and paper. I keep meaning to write it down, but I lack the time.

Okay. Sorry for the word vomit. COLORRRR.

Okay, you I can say because I know you know what the fuck it is and won't be impressed by the word, I know I'm not an actual tetrachromat, I just tell people things on tumblr based on how well I do on those color quizzes. (Obviously you can't take the online tests for this, a computer monitor can't give you the entire gamut you need). This article about how horseshit the science behind it is... is wonderful.
These, however, which don't spout Facebook Conservative science, are wonderful and pretty good practice. I'm pretty damn good at them.
I have all the symptoms of Klinefelter's Syndrome (haven't undergone a karyotype test yet) but if it were true, I'd be the ideal candidate for tetrachromacy - three chromosomes to see it with!
Besides, what could I do with this magic, since the cadmium red doesn't fucking change depending on who's looking at it? I can't mix it any brighter than it is raw, sadly. Don't worry about it.
And I would much rather go DEEPER rather than FARTHER with color. People are still writing music even without inventing a 14th note. (Though some have, but they're just subdivisions of the same spectrum of notes.) People don't invent new letters of the alphabet for their books, unless the author is especially pompous, because all letters are just subdivisions of the possible gamut of sounds you can make with your mouth and throat. So it is with color.
I'm afraid I don't have anyone to cite, so take me with a grain of salt.
And goddammit, I'd love to see like a mantis shrimp, but I'd be pissed at the poor gamut of human art supplies in comparison, and no one would ever know to look at my pieces. It wouldn't be half as much fun as one'd think.

Someday we'll be able to implant another color onto your eyes. Or you can get fucked up during cataract surgery, like Monet, and no longer have your retina block as much UV light (you won't be able to see it straight out, but it'll make you much more sensitive to the shades of the purple end of the spectrum, like skin tones and flowers).
I love the theory that that's the case with him... so many famous artists that science is DESPERATE to say "There's a scientific reason this artist was an individual!" Like how Rembrandt's self-portraits (a lot of artists) reveal crooked eyes, the type that makes your depth perception not line up perfectly and make it easier for your brain to translate your eyes to a flat canvas. Or Francis Bacon having dysmorphopsia (which I would love to be true). And the hypotheses that fall flat on their face, like "El Greco had Astigmatic Corrective Glasses," hampered by the fact that the test subjects would adapt quickly to the proportions, that self-portraits and letters and belongings make no mention of eye trouble or glasses or bridge marks, and that his sketches reveal that he totally drew people normally and stretched them out when he actually painted them... almost like an aesthetic choice. Huh!

I love stories like that, but I honestly think it’s more of a matter of linguistics, than straight up psychology. Of course, language does affect our perception.

I'd argue that Medieval people would have had loads of opportunities to see the colour orange, before the fruit were a thing; fire, fall leaves, bright orange slime molds, clouds at sunset, certain types of lichen, how the interior of some types of chopped wood gain a bright reddish or orange hue…. And speaking of orange, my grandmother still calls orange “red” and pink “light-red” because her generation didn’t have a proper word for either.
Some languages still don’t have one word for green, like lot of old languages didn’t have one word for blue. Russian one the other hand has two - which apparently gives them a different relationship to blues than Westerners. Due to things like this, it might be a bit difficult to create one universal “psychological” colour wheel based on how radically different people’s views would be.

That said, I love your idea, and appreciate the inclusion of cyan and magenta. It’s a neat line of thought that gives me associations to both psychological homunculi, and the mathematical approach to art during the Rennecance. I don’t quite see how the number of divisions matter, though, seeing as the limits of human colour perception makes a 16-point and, say, a 10-point Munsell wheel functionally the same after a certain number of divisions. We can only differentiate between so many hues of green, and what not. Perhaps I’ll change my mind once I actually see it?

Speaking of colour wheels. The yurmby wheel is definitely the one I consider the most useful for painters. It’s certainly the one I tend to stick to. Here is a Gamut Mask tool that I encourage everybody interested in colour theory to take for a spin.

In the end, I don't think it matters much how packed your eye are with cones upon cones; one’s brain would still only see (sorry, perceive) what it’s wired to see. If we had the eyes of a butterfly, we still wouldn’t see ultra violet due to our brains lacking the equipment to decipher the signals. Like some people are blind not because their eyes don’t function, but because of something wrong with how the signals are interpreted in the brain.

Obviously I find all of this very interesting, so I'm sorry for rambling on like this. It's nice to finally find somebody with whom to discuss it, though :)