I'll be attempting to do color paint overs on this piece starting today.
I'll be honest. I have no clue what I'm doing, but this experience truly has challenged me and revealed a lot of weaknesses. And the evidence of that is I'm finding a lot dissatisfaction in the process and the product of the work involved. Meaning, when I'm sitting, putting headphones on a re-drawing lines, painting over areas twice or three times because it doesn't look right, that's when you can very easily just want to give up, move onto something else, or just think it's an automatic failure.
Ya, maybe this piece isn't chosen for the critique, but at least all of the work involved taught me things:
- Learning to deconstruct objects in the world into simple shapes, enables you to place them in proper perspective.
- Stylizing a human character still requires anatomy.
- Try to draw something from memory, if you can't really do it well or if it doesn't look right, then look at references, draw something in a cheaper sketch book to get a feel of the object you're trying to draw.
- Thumbnails and a lot of planning and messy drawing construction is very important at the start when planning a composition to look good.
- I think gauging a completed "area" of a paint over or a drawing section, is considered "good enough" if you stop having that "this urks me" feeling. For instance, the park on the left for me is "good enough" because it generally looks like a park. It might not look appealing but it conveys the message.
- Getting feedback is helpful because different perspectives can spark a new and improved idea.
- Showing your work while you're in the middle of making the drawing is helpful because you can see if its readable or accomplishing your goal. Wendy for too long wasn't a girly girl, so now she has bangs and a head band. Whether this improved it significantly, IDK but I should probably keep going.
One extra note:
Trying to paint over my grayscale with a Multiply/Soft Light layer and the color wasn't coming out and I realized I needed more grays in the sky. So I took a gander on the internet and found a sky I liked and realized that Sky, grayscaled, is pretty "dark" in a way. Another thing to brush up on, when drawing black and white gray scales.
Colors REALLY make things "pop" so to speak. My perception of sky feels like, the blue in the sky is bright so a lighter gray? But I guess with paint overs, you'd do a 50% or a 40% gray instead. This can get pretty technical.
