Went back and looked at my first digital paintings from 2019 vs what I did last month

The old ones were so flat and muddy because I was scared to use stark contrast, but once I started painting with pure black and white values underneath it made the colors pop way better, has anyone else noticed a huge jump after switching up their process like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

fisher.diana7d ago

hold on, let me play the other side here. all that pure black and white under stuff just flattens everything out and makes it look like a cheap comic book. i tried that method and ended up with colors that felt dead and artificial because you're basically working backwards from a grayscale map instead of letting the hues breathe naturally. you get these weird muddy midtones where the transition hits wrong, and suddenly your nice skin tone looks like bruised concrete. i actually got way better results by just picking my darks and lights from the start and keeping my values loose, letting the colors fight it out on the canvas itself.

willow7327d ago

Totally get what you're saying about the muddy midtones, I ran into that exact wall when I tried to do a value study for a portrait of my dog. I had this whole grayscale block-in going, thought I was being smart, then when I started layering color over it, his fur just turned this weird greenish-brown that looked nothing like his actual golden coat. Had to scrape it all off with a palette knife and start over, just mixing darks and lights straight from the tube and slapping them on wet. Ended up way more vibrant and actually caught that warm, golden glow he's got in the sun instead of something that looked like a bad filter. Sometimes you just gotta trust the paint to do its own thing, you know?