The Painters' palette

About palettes

The Painters' palette

Each color reference model must have a Painters' palette. This is the only palette required for your Ink and Paint department to start painting the drawings. They cannot change this palette; only your color stylist can do so (but see Setting the background color). Your painters hence always use the same color to paint the same regions of a character - which prevents mistakes.

For the Painters' palette, we recommend that your color stylist deliberately exaggerates the colors, so none of the palette wells have colors that are similar to each other. This also prevents mistakes, stopping your painters confusing similar colors. So if a character is styled with several similar tones of blue, you can exaggerate the difference in your Painters' palette - or even make them completely different colors, such as red and yellow.

It doesn't matter that these exaggerated colors aren't the ones you'll use in your final output. When you composite the scene, you can then swap to the output palette that holds the correct colors.

For example, here's an exaggerated Painters' palette for the clown:

Output palettes

You can use the Painters' palette for final output; indeed, it's the default palette, because it's the only one that is always present. However, we strongly recommend that you create additional output palettes, and use these for output instead. Here are some reasons why it's a good idea to do this:

You can change the color styling during production, without changing the colors your ink and paint department use. They don't have to learn the new colors, and so will make fewer mistakes.

You can use very similar colors in your styling without this causing problems for the ink and paint department, because you can make the colors different in the Painters' palette.

You can easily create and modify additional color styles for the same character. Your character may appear in various scenes with different lighting; or it may appear several times in the same scene, but colored different ways, as part of a crowd.

Note that you don't need to create the output palettes until you require them for compositing and output.

About palettes

The Painters' palette

Output palettes