Schoolism Assignment 4: Coloring in Assignment 1

Well, once again I don't have time (oh when will I have time?.... ) to do a complete step by step of coloring in this drawing thoug I did take screenshots of it the whole way through.

The assignment this week in Painting In Painter with Ryan Wood was to color in the black and white drawing we did in Assignment One. But first I had to tweak the drawing as per his video critique. Some of his suggestions were to bring the hands out a lot more, so they along with the face, become the focal points. To knock back the dress a bit, and to make the lighter area of the background on the right side more uniform, not quite so bright, and to make a definite separation, on an angle, between light and dark background tones. Oh, and to tilt and move the ribbon on the dress to the left to create a more dynamic angle down the front of the body. So here is the result of all that tweaking:

Then we were to block in color using a very large airbrush, after putting down a sepia gradient undertone. I felt very unsure of this, not really feeling that sepia is the right color for a dynamic image of a modern day kid in karate pose, and wearing pink, purple and baby blue... not really colors one thinks of in a sepia toned image! But I had fun.

Here is the result of the first day when I was totally goofing around (and trying also to get the fake pink on his cheeks from his halloween makeup)... very garish! lol! At least I had fun. But I felt I couldn't use this to start my actual assignment.

(note this was done on my pre-tweaked greyscale illo: you can see the changes above: more light in background on angle, brought out wig hair on the left that had been very dark etc)

So I took out my reference (same images as previously but colour versions):

And this is what I ended up with when I shut down shop last night. I hate to say I really really disliked it. I felt that I was unsure of how to do the background and not get the airbrush blue all over the person. I felt that even though I turned down the opacity of the airbrush to 8%, that it was still shriekingly shockingly brightly colored, and it kind of looked garish. And that my skin tones looked kind of like ripe mangoes with bruises. Deary me.

Thank god for Facebook encouragement. Various other illustrators and friends with taste assured me it looks great, and love the background, love the dress, etc. So tonight I felt a bit more reassured and confident and just threw myelf into fixing the skintones. I have painted before, adding a lot of color to skintones, so I felt competent in my "seeing" ability, just not in using the airbrush in Painter, on these transparent layers. So I just brought the airbrush down to a weeny pencil size, and scribbled color I wanted all over where I wanted it, kind of like building up a drawing with colored pencil. And looking a lot a lot at my reference.

So this is where it was when I got that finished:

And a closeup of the face.

Then I did what I did with the black and white image of Assignment 1, used a larger airbrush, and dipped in a lot with the eyedropper tool, to smooth out all that colored scribbling to make the skin look more like skin. I did it again with a lot of transparency, so that we could still see a lot of the scribbling texture: I hated that sort of soft airbrushed look at the "ripe mango" stage of day 1.

Finally I went back in and added things like a highlight on the hair and rimlight on the arms in blues and greens to tie in with the lighting and colors on the face, and got out the pencil again to tighten up the eyes and redo the stray hair details that had gotten lost in all the airbrushing.

And here is my final submitted assignment for Coloring In. Hope it's ok.