So I didn’t want to paint today. Honestly, I didn’t want to do much of anything today. But I stared at last week’s attempt at painting for awhile, and decided to see what The Google could tell me about painting over sketche, because I kept getting lost once my lines were covered up, and despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to “paint inside the lines” to the point that the fields of color completely lined up with the linework- there would be a lot of gaps, or the color would be uneven, where my lines were smooth.
Exhibit A.
On the second or third page of results (the first being filled with videos, and I really dislike video tutorials for some reason; I think it’s that I prefer to work at my own pace) I found this deceptively simple coloring tutorial.
Now I know that the Smudge Tool isn’t exactly something that one is supposed to use as a “go-to,” but for some reason, the simplicity of the tutorial, or something else, like the less-than-super-polished final product made this resonate with me. Maybe it was just the bold application of darks and lights over midtones. I dunno, but I ran with it.
I changed the line layer’s opacity to something like 30% and started laying down color. One of the (few) things I do know about painting, if not how light works is that there is usually a highlight on the opposite side of any given pool of shadow, so I tried to keep that in mind.
Next, I started smudging:
Then I realized that I might not be able to get away from my lines, at least not yet, but I could (probably) downplay them a little bit if they weren’t quite so starkly different. So I changed them to a shade of green, in the hopes that they’d blend in a bit better:
It was at this point that I realized that my highlight was a little too close to the midtone value, even though I’d tried to add some yellow to it instead of just using a tint ( I also know a wee bit of color theory). So I went back and drastically lightened the highlight color, and reapplied it all over the place.
It was actually a little distracting to have the non-green areas lined in green for some reason (I don’t know why), so I left them black for now. I suppose I’ll line them in a color closer to what the midtone color is supposed to be, but for now, I left them black, because I only wanted to work on the green areas.
So I started smudging, erasing and reapplying color with low-opacity brushes (the “right”way to do it). I’m not 100% sure that I like the way that it’s going, but hell, I did something.
