My Little Pony Color Guides

[kefkafloyd]

Though I had mentioned these in the fanart thread, I wanted to make its own thread so I could have a long winded post explaining what I did.

Why make color guides? Well, the show has a unique and varied color palette and as someone who works with color both creatively and scientifically, I really appreciated the work that went into designing the color palette of the show. People were asking many times for help in IRC and other places on colors used in the show, so instead of having people eyedropper bad sources over and over again, why not make a reference that one can keep handy?

How'd you make them? Hasbro has released several bits of official artwork of many characters out on the internet in convenient vector format. The files are unencrypted and open right up in Illustrator and other applications. Using a combination of that official artwork, my pile of color books, and HD sources, I put together a convenient list of swatches just for you.

What are PANTONE colors? Why not just list RGB or CMYK values? In the United States (where the show was primarily developed), the artists and graphic designers are most familiar with Pantone's spot color system. A spot color is an extra ink or color that exists outside of a printed work - namely because the tones you're aiming for exist outside normal CMYK color gamuts. This would make the Pantone color a fifth, special ink. However, you can also use these color libraries for general purpose work and simulate the appearance of the Pantone color in your destination color space, be it CMYK or RGB.

Now here's the rub - color spaces are tricky things. Depending upon your illuminants and components (R G B photons or CMYK inks) you can get different visual renderings for the same numbers. This is why a device independent color space, like LAB, is important. However, the average artist doesn't work in LAB color space. Thankfully, most applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc) today have built-in LAB Pantone libraries in addition to CMYK equivalents. These LAB libraries allow you to get a more accurate rendering of a spot color in a destination space, as well as help when rendering partial tints of the colors without any extra work on your part.

What does this mean for you and the color guide? It means that when you say "I want Pantone 100 C for Fluttershy's body" you'll get something as close as you can reproduce in your color space regardless if it's CMYK or RGB in the end. It also means instead of building your own swatch libraries from scratch you can use standardized sources for your color and be assured that they'll look consistent across your work. If I had just listed RGB colors, they mean very different things across gamuts. Plus, I cut my teeth in printing and graphic design, and we eat and breathe Pantone. It's just what we do. If you really want more lessons on color management, gamuts, theory, etc, then just ask me and I'll be happy to expound.

Okay, but you still used RGB definitions in some places. Why? I couldn't find reasonable tints or swatches from the library to match those colors. In that case, I deferred to what was provided (e.g. Rarity's hair gradient) or my best guess based on sources (Applejack's hat). I intend to get proper swatches at some point, but for now as long as you assume sRGB color space, those numbers should get you in the ballpark.

This looks different than my TV or videos on the internet! Why? Your TV is not a calibrated monitor, most likely, and compression has likely altered the true nature of the color. In my estimation, the "truest" of color for the show is the HD episodes available on iTunes. For printed pieces, that's another story entirely, since you're crossing over into CMYK and it's entirely possible that the show production has slightly different palettes than the guys in the merchandise/packaging production. That's all base speculation on my part, but it wouldn't surprise me.

The PDF looks funky in my viewer. Why? You're not using a color management-aware viewer.

What are the uses of these color lists? You might want to color-coordinate something to a pony (such as a forum theme), or have a stable reference for your artwork. You can open up the PDF versions in your favorite applications and automatically get the proper swatches via copy and paste or inheritance - no eyedropper required.

Where can I find them? You can find them on my DeviantArt.

I disagree with what you chose, or I think there's an error. Well, let me know your opinion and I'll see what I can do. These guides are produced only for the intent to inform and assist and are not endorsed or affiliated with Hasbro or other sources. Reverse engineering at its finest.

What guides are available?

Twilight Sparkle
Rainbow Dash
Applejack
Pinkie Pie
Rarity
Fluttershy
Princess Celestia
Spike
Apple Bloom
Scootaloo

What future ones are planned?

Princess Luna / Nightmare Moon, Derpy, Big Macintosh, Trixie, Sweetie Belle, other background ponies. These ones will require a lot more effort to create since they will essentially be created from scratch with no starting point. I also need high quality vector sample art to go with them; I will probably wind up redrawing them when I have time.

Changelog:

3/8/11 - Updated Rainbow Dash with a new orange and main body color.
3/7/11 - Added Scootaloo.
3/3/11 - Added all of the initial guides.

[Momar]

At the risk of sounding overly sycophantic: you, sir, have an eye for colour that I envy. Thanks for these swatches. Now I can keep photochopping without having to recheck against the originals.

[synthorangeLook at me, I'ma talking butt!]

Yes, YES! Ponies and Pantones!

[Beef Assistant]

Fucking awesome, thanks for this.

[Wulfolme]

I would just like to say ehhhhhhh about how those official vector art images look compared to the show versions, especially the Celestia one.


Ehhhh.


Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

[Concerned ReaderI didn't inhale]

You should post them to the groups on DA as well, so they can get the the people who need them most. http://mlpfriendshipismagic.deviantart.com/ http://mylittlecomrade.deviantart.com/ http://mlp-fim.deviantart.com/

[SnakebiteWhy am I here...?]

Thank you kindly, good sir. I faved them all for future reference.

[kefkafloyd]

You should post them to the groups on DA as well, so they can get the the people who need them most. http://mlpfriendshipismagic.deviantart.com/ http://mylittlecomrade.deviantart.com/ http://mlp-fim.deviantart.com/

I don't know if I want to be associated with... that. o_O

Thanks for the kind comments, all.

[Concerned ReaderI didn't inhale]

I don't know if I want to be associated with... that. o_O

Thanks for the kind comments, all.

Haha, I didn't say look at the art in the groups.

[kefkafloyd]

Scootaloo is now up for your coloring pleasure.

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These are wonderful, thanks for making them!


Now, I've never worked with Pantone colors before... do you have any good resources that I could peruse to better understand the process of working with, and all that?

[kefkafloyd]

These are wonderful, thanks for making them!

Now, I've never worked with Pantone colors before... do you have any good resources that I could peruse to better understand the process of working with, and all that?

Pantone publishes various color books as part of their color matching system. In the United States, the Pantone Matching System is the market leader in secondary color matching. All serious software applications (Adobe Creative Suite, Quark XPress, etc) have the swatch libraries built in to their applications for ease of use.

The swatches used by the primary artists (and by me, when none were supplied) are from the Pantone Solid Coated library. What does this mean? Let's break it down.

Pantone - the publisher of the color guide. There are other color guide publishers out there with their own matching systems. These include Focoltone, Toyo, HKS, et cetera. Most of these are geographical in nature - Pantone was formed in the United States, for instance, and it dominates the US market for colors.

Solid - The type of color you're angling for. Pantone has many libraries - solid colors mean the color is 100%, not a percentage tint. There are metallics, pastels, fluorescents, et cetera. This is opposed to the Pantone Process library, where the colors are formed via the CMYK color process and are never "spot" colors. See more below...

Coated - The type of paper stock you're printing on. Coated stocks are purer, more vibrant, and have less dot gain due to their smoother surface. When most people talk about Pantone colors, they're referring to the coated libraries. The uncoated library is available for better previewing how the color will look on an uncoated stock.

When you buy a Pantone color book, what you're buying is not just samples of the colors printed on the sheets, you're buying the formulas to create those colors. These colors are formed just like how a painter would mix two of his paints to generate an all new color. You combine a ratio of two or more inks to create the new ink (e.g. one part PMS Yellow, Two Parts Rhodamine Red). This gives you a brand new spot color that you might not be able to reproduce inside the limitations of a CMYK system. Printers can either mix the inks together themselves, or they can buy pre-mixed ink cans.

Now, you can simulate the appearance of Pantone colors in alternate systems, like CMYK or RGB gamuts. This is exactly what happens when toy boxes are printed or when the show's colored for television, respectively. If the producer of the work was really anal, he or she could have, say, Fluttershy always printed with her specific spot colors on her packaging. The trouble is that even with her minimal amount of colors this results in five extra inks on your sheet, which is generally uneconomical when you're already running four process inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). The solution is to simulate the spot color to a process color. All of these colors are defined with alternate color space values. Here's an example.



Rainbow Dash's red is Pantone 032 red. It has a CMYK alternate space defined in this case, but this can easily be converted to an RGB alternate.

So why define them as Pantone colors? Well, like I said earlier - all major design and graphics applications have Pantone libraries built in. You can easily select Pantone 032 C as your color in any Adobe Creative Suite application, or in Quark XPress, or to date myself even more, Freehand, PageMaker, et cetera. Instead of messing around with making color libraries by tediously typing in your sim values, you can just pick your color from a list and be guaranteed that color.

Something else that's available is the Pantone Process color library, which are pre-made swatches using only CMYK inks. These colors are separate and distinct from the Pantone Solid library, because they can all be reproduced in normal process color gamuts. Some (likely many) Pantone Solid colors will have slight differences to their "true" colors when simulated to process for several reasons.

1. The color doesn't exist inside the device-dependent gamut. Your monitor, paper, inks, etc. all determine what colors can be produced. If your monitor, for instance, doesn't have RGB primes pure enough to produce certain colors, you'll never see those colors from your device, ever - not without color management, at least. While a process color system like CMYK can make many, many colors, you just can't get some of those colors out of the gamut.

2. Spot colors simulated to Process are dirtier when printed due to rosette patterns. This is less of a problem in RGB systems which are true continuous tone, or with high end inkjet plotters which have superfine screening and eight inks to work with, giving them enormous gamuts. For traditional offset printing, though, your gamut is limited by how much total ink your paper can hold in addition to your line screen, inks used, etc. Take a loupe or some kind of magnifier and look at some solid colors in printed works - you'll see that in reality many of them are not solid, they're composed of CMYK dots. Next, take a look at, say, a can of Coca-Cola - the red (and white, for that matter) are solid colors that exist on their own. Only two "colors" are truly necessary.

As far as I can tell, Pantone Process library colors are not used in MLP, and most designers simply work from the coated libraries and then simulate after the fact. If you're a fanartist, you don't really care about that in some cases. If you're working digitally, your RGB monitor can already faithfully reproduce many spot colors that CMYK could never hope, but not all of them. For all intents and purposes, simulations should suffice, as that's exactly what's happening when the color is produced on TV.

If you're working in traditional media (not printed works, but painting, drawing, etc), it's tougher, but if you had a pantone color book, you could try matching your paints, pencils, or markers to it.

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Okay, I understand it a bit more clearly now. Thanks for taking the time to type all that up.

[kefkafloyd]

I'm currently working on guides for new characters. One problem I have is that I don't have a ready source of vector graphics for a variety of minor characters. I've been using Twilight as a fill-in model in the interim.

Could I ask our resident drawing pros for some assistance? All I need is some simple linework that I can either run through Streamline or ready vectors. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

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Any characters you looking for in particular?

[kefkafloyd]

The ones I have queued are Luna, Nightmare Moon, Big Mac, Derpy, Trixie, and Sweetie Belle. Luna's and Big Mac's palettes are basically done, just waiting for proper artwork... though I'm still waffling on several color choices.

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Im working on some stuff tonight, but once that's done, maybe I'll take a crack at Nightmare Moon or Trixi. I'm looking for any excuse to play around in Illustrator right now.

[PerrydottoHow is a pegasus like a writing desk?]

I'm just dusting this off to say that the color guides are a fantastic thing and I would love to know if you're planning on doing more, Kefka. No pressure, just wondering - Ones like S2 Luna and other characters would be awesome to have. Thank you so much for your work on these

[kefkafloyd]

They're limited by my access to vectors (someone needs to give me something I can use in AI) and I'd rather make something if I know what the true print colors are instead of wildly picking them from the air. Also, AI CS6 and its treatment of spot color alternate values irritates me to no end, but that's just a minor setback.