Color Meanings

Crawling out of a musty tunnel, your eyes are shattered by crisp daylight as you push through fans of wet, leafy forest. The air is sweet and lush, and breathe in deeply, feeling surrounded by the relief of a flourishing earth – a new adventure ahead.

[ image: green leafy goodness – video game graphics, ideally ]

Your next breath feels a little sharp, and with a few more you smell a sour pungeance as the corners of your eyes fill with sickening fog.

[ image: fog coming in from the sides ]

How do you imagine the colors look for this scene? Healthy forest and colors of molds or toxins can both be green in real life and fantasy.

[ image of the poison logo, mold, and rainforest – with the green color-picked to show similarity ]

So in a video game, some greens are a natural choice.

[ image: video game mock-up with color-picked fog + leaves ]

After reading the earlier lessons, you know a quick way to make the environment and fog easier to tell apart is adjusting one to have a different saturation or hue tint – or a combination of these.

[ image: video game mock-up with color-picked adjustments for fog + leaves ]

Beautiful! Is that you over there, or is it Yoshitaka Amano with a hat. You text your Dad for approval of how far you’ve come since the morning, and they respond thanking you for the abstract art. You wonder if he’s been using a water-damaged phone again – which reminds you that he’s viewing it in grayscale.

[ image: video game mock-up in grayscale, where leaves and fog blend together as the same shade of grey ]

For him – and other color-limited eyes or devices – the saturation is 0. To set the colors apart on all displays, you change the values of each color away from each other.

[ image: video game mock-up with color-picked adjustments for fog + leaves with less similar values ]

Dad loves it, but a certain sibling doesn’t hold criticism back, and tells the family group chat it looks like generic clip art. As a thunderstorm rumbles on, you decide to color pick around a reference image of a forest picture near a foggy castle to match the eerie rainfall outside. Adjusting the colors to be closer to blue (cool) colors gives the picture a mysterious tone.

[ image: video game mock-up with color-picked adjustments for fog + leaves with less similar values ]

Later, feeling worn out on Tuesday already, you try out a palette with bright neons of nights in Tokyo – keeping the darker parts cooler (more blue or purple) and the comparisons between the colors similar to the earlier image.

[ image: video game mock-up with a vaporwave palette ]