Trying to nail down this new approach to color and light. I’ve been trying to keep layers to a bare minimum, and abstaining from the smudge brush completely. I’m using 20-50% opacity brushes, mostly completely hard but also using 30% hardness brushes for trickier details to make the blending easier.
Chinese New Year card for my parents and parents-in-law
It’s of course very restricting to only be using bright, pastel-y colors, but I don’t think that this color-illumination scheme precludes dark and heavily desaturated colors. Since I’ve only drawn one or two nighttime settings in the past, I decided to use a soft light layer to make life a little easier, because I have a hard time picturing what shade my color of interest would be with reduced lighting.
In the following Valentine’s Day card, I used desaturated, high value yellows and greens to signify light (which is coming from an unspecified source just outside the field of view) and a mixture of desaturated, low-to-medium value purples to signify shadows. I think this highlights, by constrast, the reds and pinks of the skin to give more life and bloodflow to them. On the other hand, these lighted regions give an iridescent feel to the periwinkle top, and a mossy organic luster to the gray denim, which are interesting side-effects.
I had to use layers to prevent myself from smashing my head against the desk when it came to depicting my wife’s and my hands, but at the same time, I’m sad that the hard edges bouding each layer look almost like paper cut-outs. I want to keep trying to find ways to intermix the layers to give the feeling of a single unified canvas. I’ve started using “overpainting” layers to attempt to blend some of these hard juxtapositions and let objects from different layers interlock, such as hair and grass weaving around fingertips.
Valentine’s Day card for my lovely wife