I need some help figuring out where I am going wrong with this one.
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@lee-white great input Lee. Yes, this is something I am aware that I do. I even lamented to my wife last night about having to lean on such a cruch in my art, but without it the image looked so lifeless. I have a serious issue when it comes to color. I cannot figure it out. When I do images in black and white, things seem to work well, but once I start dropping color in I cannot figure out how the values change. I have no clue how people just drop color onto an image and paint. Here are a couple of my black and white images. Notice I do not rely on rim lighting:
I cannot get from this to color without rim lighting the crap out of the images. My brain cannot fathom how it works. Color for me is such a confusing issue. Is there a transition in learning I am missing from doing black and white pieces and then applying color?
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@lee-white looking better? I brightined the clouds behind him, and started removed the harsh rim lighting.
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@eric-castleman I too, would like to hear how people approach this because I struggle with moving to color, especially when I'm doing a series in which certain local colors have to stay the same (character's clothes, for example.) What I started doing was painting a monochrome value study and then when I choose a color, I use the classic color picker (in Procreate) to make sure the value slider stays on the same place as the value in the monochrome study. It feels very mechanical though and I'd rather have a better innate sense about what I'm doing.
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@eric-castleman The latest image us an improvement but the background ship is still too dark. It has nearly the same value as your character and with it being a more a simplified shape it draws way too much attention to itself. I would recommend lightening the background ship and darkening the clouds around it so that the biggest contrast in value is around the character.
I feel the same way you do about color. One thing that has helped me recently is to create a grayscale layer in Photoshop. Make a new layer that stays on top of the others. Change it from normal to color then fill the layer with pure black. It will make everything grayscale to reveal the values and you can turn it off and on anytime by hiding the layer. When I would struggle with a spot I would "turn on" the layer, select the spot in question in it's layer, bring up the Hue and Saturation menu, then adjust the sliders while in grayscale untill the value looked right. It's scary because you don't know what your color is going to be changed to but if you can get the value right you'll get a good idea or where the color should be if you're not happy with what the blind change did. Sometimes it's wonky but just breaking away from the color I thought I should use and tinkiering with new colors worked better for me. I hope you figure it out. This piece looks cool.
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Yea, I use a glazing technique.
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@eric-castleman Hey Eric - Here is a Sam Nielson video from Schoolism where he talks about exposure - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRlc2B5l-HE when i did the paint over i thought in terms of exposure and tried to overexpose the background to make it recede and darken the foreground and save detail for the foreground - Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi explain exposure best in one of their classes but i could not find a video for it - but here is a pretty good one from them concerning lighting - anyways - this might all be stuff you know but i found them helpful
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@jon-anderson here it is with just a few changes you suggested. Busy day at work so just inching along until tonight.
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@eric-castleman That is looking better. Keep an eye on the saturation of that background ship so that it still doesn't steal too much thunder from your character. Just dropping the saturation a little may go a long way in making it feel like it is actually in the background. One other thing I just notice, and you probably just haven't had time to adjust it yet, is the rim lighting on that ship. You reduced it on the foreground but it still looks heavy on that ship which makes it want to pop forward more than you might intend. (And I can totally relate to the "being at work" thing.)
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Here’s an update:
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I was wondering about that rope. Here's a quick view without it.And also open up a bit of space on the left side a bit and scale down the ship in the upper right.
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also, here is a quick color pass. I did this using my finger on my laptop trackpad, so it's not very accurate, but it's a start. I wanted to simplify your shapes and separate your character. Maybe go very dark with your values and details on him so everything doesn't look like that muddy middle brown tone. Just a thought....
