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It's a sort of lizard-man now - leveling up digital painting
Golden Yak
Burnished BovineThe sunny beaches of CanadaRegistered User regular
Burnished BovineThe sunny beaches of CanadaRegistered User regular
Been trying to level up my digital painting lately. I'm pretty happy with my lineart and greyscale values are coming along, but I'd love some help improving my coloring (and my lineart and greyscaling if it turns out I'm foolishly overestimating them.)
My latest effort of this evening, some monstrous humanoid with traces of bat in its ancestry and cancerous tumors blooming on his noggin. Everything's done with Photoshop.
I've seen people have lots of good results with colorizing greyscale images, so I thought I'd give it a try.
Here's colors layer set multiply, which I liked but felt was a little too dark
Overlay - Easier to see, but they feel a bit too washed out
I tried combining having both the previous layers with different opacity for this
I feel that works best... but my highlights feel too dim now.
Any thoughts?
My latest effort of this evening, some monstrous humanoid with traces of bat in its ancestry and cancerous tumors blooming on his noggin. Everything's done with Photoshop.
I've seen people have lots of good results with colorizing greyscale images, so I thought I'd give it a try.
Here's colors layer set multiply, which I liked but felt was a little too dark
Overlay - Easier to see, but they feel a bit too washed out
I tried combining having both the previous layers with different opacity for this
I feel that works best... but my highlights feel too dim now.
Any thoughts?
Golden Yak on
+1
Posts
As for the coloring, it's a solid start- just a heads up that if you aiming for a rich, painted final look, you're almost always going to have to apply more than one color layer to accomplish that, because it can be difficult to get exactly what you want when you're trying to figure out how the colors you're picking are going to be effected by the blending modes (as you saw, one of the difficulties can be getting nice, saturated shadows when you're always blending with a grey tone). Don't be afraid to experiment and paint on top of your layers just with a normal layer to get what you need.
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Definitely needed the extra attention to rendering, I think it's a big improvement. Still a few areas I wanna tweak, but I decided to check out what the colors looked like with these new values.
Hey, looking better already.
I'll give him another evening then I think I'll start a new creature.
Could spent some more time on the colors, but I think I'll move on to another piece and see if I can nail the rendering quicker first.
B&W so far:
Color scheme mucking about:
Haven't made much progress lately - too busy with work.
I'm worried that I get too bogged down trying to render every minute detail. But I'm not very happy with the results when I try to generalize - it seems too muddy and blurry to me.
I persevere...
edit: to expand a bit more, the thick black outlining of each detailed element are flattening out your sketch before you've even begun. I think there's two problems here, overlapping each other. The first is with your form, linework and inking. Even linework has to consider light sources. Usually you accomplish this by varying your linewidth and strategically adding or removing detail. S_O's old inking tutorial might come in handy: http://smokinghippo.com/TSOtutes/inking_tutorial.html , although it is not a comprehensive guide by any means - but it gives you at least a little bit of an idea of what we mean when we say 'vary your linewidth'.
You may find that with a more solid underpinning for your painting, you will find it easier to apply the items bacon talked about earlier; start simple, break down and clarify your forms, only add detail at the end.
Personally - and this is only my preference, it's not a rule - I don't like to put too much detail into a sketch that I'm going to paint over. It holds you back and you start thinking in terms of preserving linework rather than producing an image with the paint. If you want your linework to be part of the final drawing, then you would take a fundamentally different approach to colouring the image. What you're doing here is a full painted render, and I find that benefits more from going in with only a loose sketch guide and then pulling the details and forms out through the process, rather than trying to define it in advance.
edit 2: also it looks like you're painting on a multiply layer over greyscale? This is not a bad approach, and going in first with greyscale can really help you figure out your values. But you'll find it hard to get the full range of colour values out without tweaking the curves and adding overlays, etc, at the end.
Was trying a few color schemes, it was a couple layers just to start with.
Also had some real fun making up a sort've paper-doll concept art file. I started off doing fanart of a Warcraft monster, the Faceless One, and mixed in a few of my own takes on it (inspired of course by the original Lovecraft creation). The file's set up with lots of different details and color schemes so I can mix and match to make several different monsters.
Had way too much fun with this. So I'm going to try it on a couple of other purely original creatures.
I also made an animated before and after gif so you can see the difference more directly:
Hope this is helpful. Keep at it!
I think this one's come a long way.
This one I did just now - I'm trying to teach myself how to draw something that looks like it's glowing from within. Like when you shine a bright flashlight through your palm and you can see the glowing within it.
Currently I think it looks like there's a light in front of the creature, as opposed to originating from within the creature itself. I shall perservere.