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eskiworks:

Here’s the final painting I’ve been working on! Ralenfox, who commissioned this piece, was very open about what he wanted for this illustration. The basic idea was his black fox character romping through a wintery woodland scene with some other forest critters. We ended up with a black fox that isn’t his character, but the result is essentially the same idea!
One of the things I notice when I work digitally, is that I tend to work more muted/with less contrast than what I want the final painting to look like. I always rely on the final adjustments to levels to get the contrast I REALLY want out of a piece. In the case of this painting, I found myself facing the same issue, mostly with the landscape. Usually I am aware of this phenomenon, and plan for it as I’m working. But in this case the landscape was just getting more and more muted as I worked! Suddenly, at the end of my second day working on it, I realized what exactly I was facing; Digital mud.
To explain a little more!
For a couple months I’ve been casually perusing one of my new favorite art books; James Gurney’s Light and Color. The book is all about how an artist should consider color and light, with lots of information about traditional paint, pigments, and palette mixing. Other than mixing paint, ALL the information applies to digital art as well. I was reading the chapter on “mud” recently, which is the idea that you can overmix your colors and end up with a hue-less muddy color. Some schools of thought say mud can ruin your canvas, and you ought to work with less complex mixtures of paint and more “pure” colors. Other schools of thought say that it’s all about color relativity on your canvas, so the presence of muddy paint only matters if you don’t use the right colors NEXT to it. I tend to be of both mindsets to a degree!
I’ve always been wary of “mud” in my traditional work, but the book got me thinking about it more recently. The really pure saturated colors I wanted for this painting got muddy because I didn’t have a color palette separate from my thumbnail study. So I was color picking from mixtures of the colors I wanted on the thumbnail, rather than the pure colors of a set-aside palette. Thankfully levels and other adjustments came to my rescue again, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless!

44 notes • Friday, June 01, 2012 • reblog this

hootaloo:

ugh i really want to make like a cyborg deer character

4,358 notes • Friday, June 01, 2012 • reblog this