You’ll feel better and grow so much faster when you let your art be chaotic and messy and muddy, when you use ugly colors.

Let your art breathe, grow, emerge from the colors. Let go of your carefully-placed, transparency-locked layers and slap color on your canvas like a toddler with Spaghetti-Os. One of the easiest ways to do this is to paint on one layer. That dress might be red in real life, but its shadows are purple and its highlights are blood-orange. Train your eye to see the yellow-white specularity, the cool-brown cast shadows.

Red hair isn’t red, it’s yellow and brown and white and black. Blue eyes aren’t typically stock RGB-blue, they’re grey and green and muddy browns and blacks. Teeth are yellow and brown, sclera are blue/grey/red/green. Love them in all their complex muddiness–their sludge grey/green/browns, their sickly yellows, their bruise purples.

Instead of blending, really look at references and the colors. Greens, blues, yellows, red, purples, pinks, even greys. Skin isn’t a smooth gradient of one shade to another, it is full of different hues.

I want you to focus less on blending and more on deliberate, variant color placement.

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