Dabbling in color

I hooked up the printer I have at home, however it seems to be pretty low quality. I'll download some drivers and see if that helps. Anyways, here's another piece of work I did recently.

For class, another assignment was to color some of the drawings we did for the character designs we had been working on. I missed the class, so I pretty much just dove in and went nuts without any kind of real guidance, unless you count looking at an online color wheel. That's why his pants are green.

This is my first stab at coloring using a physical medium since... hmm... maybe 7th or 8th grade. It was a lot of fun despite not knowing at all what I was doing. I cheated a bit; when I scanned it in, I took out some of this block of dark color under the chin that I accidently made.

Anyways it wasn't half as bad as I thought it would be. I learned abit about mixing colors and how to work with mistakes. You can tell by the texture that I did the shirt first, which has a very rough surface from just applying the gouache and then moving on to the next area. Later I realized they smooth out a lot if you sort of come back over it with a damp brush, which is necessary for fading colors together.

Also the color choice is very saturated because I forgot to buy a white. I don't think it took away from the painting, but I don't know if I would have picked some of those tones if I wasn't bottled into those choices. When I go back to school, I'll be meeting with my professor to go over that color exercise I missed, so hopefully that will help a lot.