As a background, I'm a very by the book, obey the rules kind of person and somewhat perfectionistic as well. I have almost zero creativity and 99% of the drawings I do I just copy using grid and copy the colors from the reference.
Lately however, I've gotten super interested in what they seem to call whimsical art and whimsical coloring or hyperpop. My instagram and tiktok feeds are filled with them, people draw everyday objects such as different foods and then color them super colorfully, like the base colors might be following the irl example but all the lights and shadows are very colorful, the colors are unrealistic and exaggerated but they still just work because the values are correct and they look absolutely amazing and magical to me. Seeing these constantly I then noticed that I too want to learn this style, I want to be able to color this way too, I want to learn the logic behind this whimsical coloring style. So I got to work and started analyzing all these drawings one by one, learning more color theory and found some tutorials as well.
Despite all this I don't seem to find the complete logic behind this all. There are some things and rules that the artists seem to follow, for example using cool tones for shadows and warm tones for light if they imagine the lighting is warm and if the lighting is cool this is swapped. They also seem to be using analogous, complementary and split complementary colors all in the same drawing and it seems to come very naturally to them and they seem to know exactly in which parts to use them so it looks good. For example they might draw a glass bottle of coca cola and as the addition for the regular colors a coca cola bottle has, there seem to be all the colors of rainbow present in the light and darks parts but in a way that it just works, so the result is a super colorful, hyperpop-ish coca cola bottle that somehow still looks exactly what it's supposed to look like, a coca cola bottle.
But my problem comes here: they freely select the rest of the colors for their drawings just based on what they personally think look good together and by their favorite colors. I also finally found a tutorial that said you can use ANY colors you like as long as the values are correct.
This is where I fail. I mean I have learned everything else needed but this is something where the logic doesn't apply, this is the part where you actually need to have the eye for things and where you need to be purely creative. I have a general idea what looks good but when I actually try to select them it then just doesn't, despite checking that the values are correct. So I'm still desperately trying to find some logic behind this all and do it all by logical choices but it doesn't seem to be enough, the whimsical part of it all seems to be missing if I go purely using color theory, because exactly their creative use of color is what seems to make this specific art style. I'm actually very scared that all these people just naturally see all the colors in their special way and they just know what looks together, that it's purely their artistic and creative eye for color with just an ounce of color theory sprinkled in and that I lack that ablity completely and that it's just something you either have or not.
Sorry for the super long post, I hope someone has time to read and discuss this topic with me!