by Scott Harris

in Tutorials

Painting

Lighting

Characters

Photoshop CC +

Illustrator

Krita

Digital Art

Affinity Photo

$12.0

Character Colour Palette System

4 Views

46 palettes and 317 colours for skin, hair, eyes, lighting and limited illustration — built so the ramps actually step evenly.

Most palette packs are built by dragging a lightness slider in HSV. The problem is that HSV's value is not perceptual lightness — equal numeric steps produce visibly uneven jumps and the midtones go muddy.

Every ramp here is built in OKLab, a colour space designed so equal steps look equal. Measured across the skin ramps, the lightness steps vary by about 0.2%. The same ramps built in HSV vary by around 7% — more than thirty times as uneven.

Skin is not one hue at seven lightnesses

Three things change along a real skin ramp, and all three are built in. Shadows drift toward red, because light scatters under the surface and comes back warm. Highlights drift toward yellow and lose saturation. And chroma peaks in the midtones, not at the light end.

No swatch is pure white or pure black. Both are traps.

A note for Procreate users

Procreate's .swatches format now requires embedded colour-profile data, and a file written without it can crash the app. Rather than ship something that might break your install, every palette is included as plain hex codes so you can build it in Procreate directly — about a minute per palette, and it will never fail.