24 Hours of Color Shifts

Images of sunrises are often mistaken for sunsets.

Every few hours, your outdoor surroundings will turn slightly different colors. You can thank the sun for the light that make color possible in our world in the first place the Earth’s turning for making it change with time. Bit by bit, your pink and purple sunrise will turn into a light blue morning, brightening as the day goes on, casting shadows until the sun can only peek at you over some mountains… Then it will melt into the ground like butter, leaving a couple clouds to remember  where it was and give way to the moon, dousing it’s fiery colors with soft purple and deep blue. Read the rest of this entry »

Working with Backgrounds and Patterns in Muzy Effects

wall by 1918underwood. Click to view.

The Effects app can have some striking results with backgrounds and patterns. Because it plays with color and texture, Effects lends itself to abstractions as much as to photos of people or pets. Here’s an example of what I did with a pretty static brick-wall background that I made in Collage a while ago. My goal was to take something that had a very regular pattern, without a lot of texture, and create something with a lot more variation and mood.

Here’s the plain brick wall that I started with. Read the rest of this entry »

Colorizing a Black and White Image in Muzy Effects

Black-and-White to Color

Muzy’s Effects app is a great way to pump up (or completely change) the color on any photograph, drawing, or collage. You don’t need to start with a bright or colorful image to get bright and colorful results. One of the fun things I found you can do is take a black and white picture and make it brightly colored. The image that you see to the left of a young and sinister Tony Perkins was created in Effects from a black and white drawing.

Let’s take a look. Here’s the black and white picture that I started with: Read the rest of this entry »

Color Photo Effects

Meno takes a rusty, gray grunge wall and uses the Effects app to create this vivid burst of color in "Riff's Rust, colorized." Click to view.

The Muzy Effects app can be used for a lot of, well, effects. One of the effects I like best is color shifting. In the image on the left, Meno has taken one of Riff’s photo… a great piece of grunge in and of itself, of a rust-ridden dusty gray metal wall… and turned it into a vibrant, charged blue-and-orange background that I just couldn’t resist using. Very Muzy, isn’t it?

So let’s explore a little bit and see what the Muzy color shift effects are in the Effects editor and how to use them. First, let’s start with a tour. Read the rest of this entry »

Color Palettes

Color palettes come in many styles… as many styles as there are artists’ imaginations. Luthien created this color wheel to demonstrate the relationships of colors in her post on The Color Wheel & Contrasts.

I thought I’d talk a little more about the palettes you can generate and use from the color wheel. Here are a few types of palettes to get your creative juices flowing. Read the rest of this entry »

Fun Muzy Activities: Color Challenges

NES Greens color palette by daniel. Click to view.

Color challenges can be great community activities, and the results are often very creative… fun to make and fun to view. Starting a color challenge is simple. Make a color palette using drawing or collage. People can bring your palette into their collages and pick up the colors using the keyboard shortcut “e.” Just include in your palette whatever colors you want people to use in their creation. This NES green color palette has a lot of variation… but you can do a color challenge with just a single color. Read the rest of this entry »

Cleaning Lineart and Coloring Items

In this tutorial, you will learn how to add color to items such as templates, bases or any sort of line art. We’ll start out with this line art from Hanakamu:

Do you see the white areas around this character’s hair and face? These are stray marks that need to be cleaned up before you start coloring. Resize the eraser and start cleaning up. If you need to smooth any lines or fix more stray marks, it’s easy to catch them now. Read the rest of this entry »