Purple-green colour schemes

One of my absolute favourite colour schemes to draw with, green and purple complement each other in a mysterious, otherworldly way. Green is a fairly common colour in nature, with purple being more of a feature colour, seen mostly in things like flowers. Seeing the way artists play with the combination, though, is always fascinating, and there are some great examples of this colour scheme.

Because purple feels somewhat opposite to the warm yellow light of the sun, it makes an excellent shadow colour, which suits scenes filled with lush, richly lit foliage, such as this scene from Quest for Glory 3. The purple shadows really help the greens to stand out. Especially interesting here is the leaves in the foreground - though they appear greenish, these are actually a mid blue - only appearing greenish because they're placed with such dark purples.

Another use of a purple among sunny green is as a nice feature colour to mix things up, as seen here. The leaves are nicely balanced, with the large patch in the top right corner evened out by the smaller patch on the left hand side, and a few smaller, individual details down in the bottom right corner. These work particularly well to break up the dominant greens, and add some wonderful variety and colour into the background.

In less sunny scenes, such as this one from King's Quest 5, the greens become less sunny and yellow, and shift to much bluer greens. The purplish blues seem to tinge everything, from shadowed sections of the path, to stones and foliage. This makes for an excellent gloomy feel, without losing the feeling of being in a forest that greenish hues bring.

Another approach is to have the sunniest greens in the background, with the nearer greens less bright, as shown in this scene from Shannara. Here the purples are just the merest hint of a rimlight on the left sides of the trees - it doesn't feel as dark and gloomy as the ominous King's Quest 5 example, but isn't as sunny and cheerful as the Quest for Glory 3 examples, either. A nice middle ground, suitable for a deep forest, without being too sinister in tone.

This scene from Gateway 2 still has a bright sky shining through the trees, but here it's a bluish purple. This light source means that the cool greens of the foreground leaves are well matched, in a very cohesive and beautiful colour scheme. The effect is still of a bright light, but less sunny and a little less friendly as well. Particularly interesting is that most of the darker colours are greens - an interesting subversion of the normal trend to make purples the darker colour in a scene.

This area from Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis does the opposite - instead of putting a bright, glaring purple in the distance, we get a rich, deep bluish colour, with a large, shadowy mountain jutting up above us, and the greens are relegated to the grassy areas. This is more a case of the materials informing the colours, but the lack of the yellowish greens in the grass, coupled with the very deep purple sky, give a feeling of a heavy, overcast day.

Sam & Max Hit the Road takes this to a fun extreme, here with a much more pink purple in the sky, and a very angular green feature in the foreground. This works for a VR simulation because the exaggerated colours make sense - It's easy to accept the massive, purple castle on the hill when it's delivered to us as part of a simulation. The greens and purples here make for a very nice complement, colours that might not work so well in a more realistic environment, but feel great here.

Fate of Atlantis also uses very warm purples in places - here the purples are being lit by lava, and so glow red in the planes where the light hits them the strongest, with bluer shades off into the distance. The green highlights really jump out here, and give the device an otherworldly look; the fact that this is an ancient machine running on mysterious energies is really represented well with the unnatural lighting from below and the presence of green lights - not a common feature in nature.

A third variant of this colour idea is evident in Fate of Atlantis, for yet another very different effect. Here the presence of stone walls is made more interesting by being lit by the eerie green lights, an interesting and mysterious change from the grey stone evident in earlier areas of the game. The purples in the shadows offset this nicely, and help some of the more interesting foreground details to stand out, while also making sure the mysterious feel of the lighting scheme is carried through into the shadowed areas.

For this eerie interior in King's Quest 5, a sickly green light does the same thing to an even greater degree, as offset once more by vivid purple shadows. Like the previous scene, the lighting feels unnatural and mysterious, and conveys an ominous atmosphere to the scene. The presence of blue sky through the windows is largely ignored as a light source, helping the green to shine unchallenged.

This shot from The Dig shows another striking example of green and purple used in an interior, but here roles are reversed, with the highlights shown in vivid purple, the shadows in dark, rich greens, and just a hint of warmer green highlights coming through the distant tunnel sections. This is a very unusual lighting arrangement - there's really very few circumstances in nature, or even in modern cities, where this precise colour scheme can be observed, and as such it looks very alien to us - a perfect colour scheme to use for when exploring an alien ruin as we are here.

Green light light can also look very alien when shown to be very vivid. This bizarre green glow coming from the rocky cavern in The Dig is mysterious and unusual, and the purple rocks, offset by very rich blue and purple features, make this entire scene very unusual. I feel this scene is slightly unbalanced - the strong green really has no other greens to offset it - but perhaps an awkward lack of balance in an alien world is something that could be considered a feature, rather than a flaw.

Here we have a shot from Space Quest 5 that shows us very bright green lights, surrounded with metallic greens and purples. The purple ceiling feels cold and metallic - a common look for science fiction corridors, and the green lights help to liven up the scene and break up the large metallic areas. This adds colour, without ruining the feeling of a technological environment, and also helps to balance the warm, green exit to the left of the scene.

This is another great example, with the purple metal corridors broken up again - this time by much more organic, alien greens. The effect is very different, without losing the dynamic of being in a science fiction setting, and the much darker, less saturated greens suit the organic forms much better than the bright, electronic greens of the previous scene.

One final, rather iconic shot here, showing a green chron-o-john hurling through the vortices of time. What sort of backdrop colour complements a green shape, and also best represents the idea of a mysterious channel through time? Dark purple, of course.

Green and purple, then, is an excellent combination, useful for many different situations - especially for magical, or otherworldly applications. Whether describing organic forms, the idea of future technology, or a combination of both, it's a powerful blend of two hues that has a range of applications. It's a very useful colour scheme, and in the right situation, can give a game's scenery a great sense of atmosphere and tone.

Full Throttle Scenery Studies

Over the past couple of months I've been regularly going through the background art of Full Throttle and making notes about it, trying to figure out what makes the scenes work so well. Those of you who follow me on Twitter have no doubt seen them appearing on my timeline regularly, and may be interesting in seeing the images in better quality than Twitter's image compression allows, and those of you who don't might be interested in seeing what I've been studying.

In any case, you can download all 29 of them compiled as a single PDF by clicking this link:

Full Throttle Scenery Analysis (41MB)

Enjoy!

Orange-blue traditional complementary palettes in scenery

I've examined two of the three examples of traditional 'complementary palettes' in adventure game scenery so far, so it's time to look at one of the most popular and useful combinations, that being blue and orange. This might be the most common example of using these traditional palettes, due to its versatility in night scenery, but there's plenty of applications that put interesting twists on the formula, and it's well worth studying them.

This example from King's Quest 6 shows how the cool blue of the main structure is warmed up by the firelight cast by the torch, with the pile of skulls behind the figure a grimy orange, all of which is framed by blue spines and ribs in the far distance. The blue of the figure and his chair is sickly and cold, reminiscent of death, most appropriately, and the warmth of that torchlight makes the scene feel more dramatic - though the blue of the backdrop could be the blue of a summer sky, torchlight wouldn't have the same radiance in such conditions.

This scene from Once Upon a Forest shows a much less warm orange light - here it feels more natural, and sunny because of the less saturated hues, that make it feel like sunlight lighting up wooden material, rather than a direct orange light hitting a surface. The blues work well to give the impression of a cool, shadowed interior, and help the warmer sections to stand out nicely.

Another sunny scene, here from Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Here the shadows go to black rather than blue, but the sky is a lovely, airy blue that helps to offset the darkness of the stone features. The sand also breaks up the dark rocks nicely, allowing those darker segments to act as nice framing and texturing devices among the lighter areas.

Again we see blue sky and orange ground, but this scene from Full Throttle feels less airy and more dusty. The orange dirt feels less like the sand of the previous scene, and more like the barren soil of an American desert. The sky is a gloomier shade, heavier and darker, and the stone features, where coloured, are a sun-baked reddish orange that feels hot and dry.

Moving to an interior from Full Throttle, we see a cavern given a dank, gloomy feel by means of those dark blues in the distance, bringing to mind the cool shade of a cave. The orange-brown foreground features stand out nicely, making the scene clear to read, and reinforcing the red, desert rock of the area (as opposed to the grey stones we saw earlier) without being too warm so as to feel brightly lit. A very clear division in hues like this makes the scene very easy to read.

Another example of a cave with blue in the distance and orange in the foreground is this scene from The Dig. The rich ultramarine of the distance feels mysterious and otherworldly, and the warm orange of the foreground feels dangerous and eerie - the hidden lightsource coming from directly below is from the opposite direction we expect sunlight, making it feel somewhat 'off'. Interestingly, Maggie's orange suit means she blends in with the foreground hues, meaning the dark values behind her, and the fact that she animates while in this web, are needed to make her stand out clearly.

Dune's sietches, on the other hand, are almost wholly orange, with no blue distant light to add a sense of depth - however, unlike Maggie's orange suit, you can see here how the blue eyes of the Fremen stand out, and catch our attention. This example is particularly powerful because of the blue stillsuit - though many Fremen have brown or green stillsuits, the blue eyes are a constant, that jump out wonderfully against all the warm colours.

From mostly warm hues, to mostly cool - here the shadowy, mysterious blue of the voodoo museum is broken up in just a couple of places by the warm glow of lighting. This is particularly effective in the foreground, where the skull and mask are made that much more eerie by the warm lights hitting them from the side and below.

Another great use of orange highlighting in a blue environment is this scene from Gateway, in which the orange face and hands of the figure really pop against the deep blue backdrop. The high levels of saturation in both colours really give this a neon drenched, science fiction feeling, particularly the way the skin of the face is shaded to a very unusual colour for skin.

This similarly futuristic scene from The Koshan Conspiracy is much earthier in tone, but the slight blue tint to the lights helps to make them look more unique than the white or warm lights we're used to seeing in an interior. The use of blue here is very minimal, but the rays of light travelling down are just blue enough to make them really feel bright against the orange tones of the backdrop.

This scene from The Secret of Monkey Island shows the opposite - very deep, saturated blues contrasted with warm yellow-orange lighting. This warm lighting is reminiscent of lamp and candle light, much more suitable for a game set in the era of pirates that the blue lights of the previous two scenes, and it really breaks up the deep blues nicely. The blue feels quite naturally nocturnal, despite being much more saturated and bright than a real world night scene would be.

If the oranges are kept quite saturated, but the blues are stripped of saturation, we get a much lighter feel, such as in this shot from Willy Beamish. The pale blues help detail the kitchen through the archway nicely, and also help it feel far from us, as well as breaking up the oranges nicely throughout the rest of the scene.

This example has the orange very saturated, and almost red in places, and the blue warm enough to be teal in spots - it's almost reaching the red and teal combination of the scene from Conquests of the Longbow I looked at two posts ago. This shows the great contrast setting deep oranges and reds above pale blues gives, with wonderful readability in the forms as a result. A really interesting use of the colours.

And with that, my examination of traditional complementary palettes in adventure game scenery is complete. There's plenty of other examples, of course, but I've tried to find a wide variety of uses that show many different effects artists have managed to achieve by using these palettes. It's a fascinating and educational subject, and I hope you enjoyed studying these scenes!

Yellow-purple traditional complementary palettes in scenery

Last week I looked at red-green colour palettes, this time I want to look at one of the other two traditional 'complementary' colour palettes.

As a comment pointed out last week, the use of the term 'complementary' for these palettes is somewhat outdated, as the modern colour wheel is a bit different to the traditional one teaching red, yellow, blue as the primary colours. Nevertheless, all the art books I've read, and all the art folks I know refer to these as complementary, so I'm going to refer to these as 'traditional complementary palettes' for now until a better way of describing them comes along. The colour wheel they're based on may be outdated, but these are still some of the most popular 2 hue colour palettes.

The Dig is a great example of several variations on this idea. Here we see a vivid purple foreground and a vivid yellow backdrop, with dark purple and dusty reds and oranges showing middle grounds nicely. The rich colours give the scene a classic 'science fiction' feeling of an alien world, and really pushing their saturation is a great way of spicing up natural looking forms to look both spectacular and memorable. Yellow rimlights also help to delineate forms nicely. I love this particular use of yellow, having the reds in between the two colours really makes the scene glow.

Another example of using reds between the two colours to give a warm glow is this scene from Shannara. The yellow candles not only warm the scene up, but also help to distinguish foreground forms, such as the human figure who sports his own personal yellow purple palette. Interesting to see how the spines of the books are hit with purple as though it was a hidden light source, despite the fact that nothing else reveals the presence of any purple light source. This may have simply been a way to tie them more closely into the scene's tight palette.

A much more exaggerated example of a red between the yellow and purple is this scene from Sam & Max. The red is so prominent here that I wouldn't call this a yellow/purple palette, but it's interesting to see how shifting the balance changes things. The purple here feels more like a background element, hitting shadows and distant object more than anything else, but it's still vivid enough to feel memorable. An odd colour combination that helps this scene feel suitably bizarre.

From a warm purple to a cool purple, The Dig once again provides another example of this combination. The yellow in the distance looks quite welcoming, from the rather alien purple in the foreground, and can be used two ways - if we were walking in from the yellow background into the purple foreground, it could feel like entering from a 'safe' location into an uncertain one. If we were going from the purple foreground to the yellow background, it could feel like leaving a potentially dangerous place into the welcoming safety of sunlight. I particularly like how the yellow hits the edges of forms here, helping to show distance and delineate form.

Similarly cool purples are present in this scene from King's Quest 6. Once again, the purple feels slightly mysterious compared to the yellow middle ground, but here it represents strange objects such as a skeleton, a crystal ball and a suit of armour, and the area in which we can walk is all yellow and 'safe'. This bluish purple helps to offset the many yellows and the whole scene has a light, airy feel that's framed nicely by these slightly darker, cooler foreground elements.

By making the yellow less vivid, or 'saturated' and making the cool purple more vivid we get a nice futuristic feel, as in this shot from Gateway. Because purple isn't a common colour for a natural light source, nor is it common for ordinary, everyday lighting, showing such a cool purple as a light really gives the scene a feeling of advanced technology. The same applies for the yellows - we're used to yellow lighting being quite warm and vivid, whether from the sun or electric lighting, and showing it in such a stark, cool form as a light makes it feel sterile and artificial. A great way to help establish a science fiction setting.

Science fiction is also well suited by warmer colours when dealing with more natural environments, though - this shot from The Dig has a sunny, warm yellow showing the alien sun bearing down on the landscape. This warms the purples up too, particularly where they cast shadows on the distant forms, which gives a strong feeling of ambient light. Once again, however, the lack of saturation in this lightsource makes it feel slightly off - it's too pale and washed out to be a sunset on Earth, which is the time of day the colours and the shadows would suggest, making this look alien and unusual.

By contrast, the yellow highlights in this scene in King's Quest 6 fight to light up an oppressive expanse of deep, saturated purple which feels gloomy and massive. Whereas the yellow in the last shot lit the distant purples right up, here the purple largely reigns, with just a few highlights of yellow here and there. This is helped by the cavernous expanse of black water which sucks up any light the torches shine also.

Between the two extremes lies this middle ground from Gabriel Knight - the purple in the darker areas feels cool and somewhat gloomy, but glows where the yellow fire hits it, warming it right up. This is a nice way of balancing out the cooler, darker areas, by showing not only the yellow light source, but the effect it can have on the purples of the image.

A similar thing can be seen in this shot from Kyrandia - where the sunlight coming in through the window hits the yellows and purples they glow with rich colour, and in the shadowy areas they both have less saturation, showing that the effect works on yellow also. Here the yellow isn't a lightsource, and the deeper colours and darker values make it feel less light and airy than the earlier interior from King's Quest 6. The combination of yellow and purple here also feels quite rich and regal - purple especially brings to mind royalty, or someone important, and the gold decorations would never be seen in a commoner's habitat. A great way to convey status through colour.

One last shot from Kyrandia, here showing a scene with no visible lightsources, but nevertheless one that has light coming from a clear direction. The purple dragon here feels more 'magical' than the more menacing, traditional red, black or green dragons. Purple is an unusual colour to find in nature, and the presence of it in a creature's colourings feels interesting more than a threatening red or black. The purple crystal ball also suggests magic, and the yellowy paper helps to suggest the writings of a wizard in some long forgotten time much more than clean, white paper we're used to seeing would. This is an interesting example of how applying these colours to materials provides insight into the setting.

As we've seen, the purple/yellow combination of colours is great at suggesting certain feelings, and by cooling them down or heating them up we can helps establish particular atmospheres. I love studying how other artists have employed these hues together, and seeing which combinations feel 'right' and trying to work out why. It's a facinating palette, used by many artists, and one well worth experimenting with.

Red-green complementary palettes in scenery

When I'm not sure what colour scheme to paint a scene in one of the nicest palettes to try is a "complementary" palette. This is what artists use to describe a colour scheme where the two main hues are directly opposite each other on the colour wheel:

Red green is one of the palettes I enjoy playing around with when I want to show a dramatic, fantastical scene. Both red and green are quite eerie to use as bold highlights, but both can also be used to show more natural things. Nature has plenty of examples of colours in this configuration that catch our eye - think of red flowers on a green bush.

These exceptional levels of contrast afforded by using directly opposite hues can be very powerful, but it can also be more subtle as well. Not all of the scenes I'll be looking at here are pure red or pure green - some of the greens verge into bluish, some reds are purplish or orangeish. Mainly, I wanted to look at a wide range of examples, to see how different uses of this idea vary in atmosphere, power and contrast.

One of the first examples that sprang into my mind was this section in Kyrandia 2. Red and green aren't the only hues present here, but they work extremely well at highlighting two different features simultaneously. The deep reds and orange highlights of the stream of lava mixed with the vivid green of the crystal features really gives an impression of having stumbled upon some forgotten place. It's a great moment in Zanthia's journey through this magical world, and stands out quite distinctly from the more naturally coloured parts of the game that came before.

Here's an example of a similar situation with a very different approach. Instead of the deep reds of the lava we saw before, here they're a blazing, fiery orange, with scorching yellow and white highlights, and the greenish bridge over it is a much more muted, desaturated grey-green, which stands out perfectly, but not as a feature. In the last scene, our green bridge was the highlight, here it's the lava that's the star of the piece.

Desaturating both colours gives an oppressive, musty feeling like this shot from Beneath a Steel Sky. The red gurney looks uninviting, and the drab green surrounds feel cold and creepy. Everything here looks old and dirty. It's repulsive, even before we get to the figures in the lockers.

The same game uses red and green to indicate new things, too. Here both highlight colours glow, the reds with rich saturation and the greens with harsh white highlights. The reds of the floor and greens of the walls are much more muted, and jump out much less at us than the highlight colours.

Similar glowing green highlights can be seen in this scene from Monkey Island 2, a powerful, harsh green that lights the trees and central structure in a very eerie way, helping to establish the feel of a mystic's dwelling. The reddish-brown building jumps out wonderfully from this green and grabs our attention, not only with hue, but being much deeper in value and saturation than the pale green. It's a great way of developing focus and leading the eye. A few small reddish brown features separate from the main structure in the form of torches on the left side of the image help to balance out the main focal point, too.

This scene from Gabriel Knight shows the roles reversed - here the red is the surrounding colour, feeling rich and aged, and also giving a great impression of somewhere dark and mystical. The green is the highlight feature, drawing our eyes to the crystal ball and firmly establishing what kind of area we're in. Similar to the torches in the last scene, a separate, less important green feature on the right side of the image helps to balance this strong green sitting in a sea of red. It's fascinating that two very similar locations can be given similar treatments with the colours completely reversed for quite similar effect.

Yet another scene with a similar treatment in The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel. Here the table takes a back seat, and the crystal ball itself is given a direct green treatment that catches the eye instantly, again with a green lamp off to the right that helps to balance such a strong hue in a sea of opposite hues. The reds here are quite purple in the shadowy areas, giving a rich, luxurious feel. This combination of red and green is excellent for establishing the feeling of a mystic's abode.

Another great example of a mysterious feel with just a few greenish highlights is this shot from Waxworks. Here the highlight colours are a rich teal, with greenish shadows that make them richer, and the reds vary between deep browns and oranges to pure red curtains that frame the shot. The use of the greenish blue highlights here really draw our attention to the points of interest. It's a great way of directing the player's eye to important elements very quickly, establishing a clear narrative in a very short space of time.

More greenish blues can be seen in this scene from Conquests of the Longbow - here the teal takes a back seat while the read becomes a rich highlight. Again we see red curtains, but here the teal is much less saturated next to the super-saturated reds. They help give the feeling of rich decoration, and the focus is mostly directed to the bed and the book with the use of value, rather than hue. It's a wonderfully rich scene.

Finally, this shot from Discworld shows red and blue together in a much more natural setting. The greens here are much more yellow than in our previous two examples, giving the impression of a warm, sunny day. The reds, despite being incredibly saturated, are quite low in value, helping them not feel like too much of a feature, while still highlighting what would, otherwise, be a rather drab, brown door.

I love these colour combinations, and I love seeing how different artists use complementary red-green palettes in different ways, and how it affects their work. It's fascinating to make direct comparisons like this and realize that even with a very specific colour idea, the results can be incredibly different. Complementary palettes are wonderfully bold in their contrast, and this is just one example of the results that can be achieved by using two opposite hues to render a scene.