Days of Shades

I was inspired by Charlie Bowater's tutorial/watch-me-paint thing floating around Tumblr, and a skin tone bit that evilsherbear posted. That, combined with a slight decrease in my stress-level, were just what I needed to pull out the art I abandoned months ago -- and change how I was working on it completely.

It's much, much easier, now.

The tutorials hit that perfect sweet stuff of "Enough new things to try without being overwhelming," and lead direction to a big realization (which, like many epiphanies it left me feeling slightly dumb) -- namely, that if I attempt to paint digitally more like I paint in, well, PAINT, I won't be trying to learn as many new things at once and it'll be much more natural, therefore I'll be better at it. I'm not sure now why I didn't start off that way -- maybe because I thought I'd be frustrated trying to make pixels behave like paint and that I should use the media to it's strengths or something -- but ah well. I was also terrified of opening the rabbit hole that is photoshop brushes, sure it'd be way too complex for me, and I was sick of managing all of my oh-shit-I'm-afraid-I'll-ruin-it-layers.

So I collapsed those damn layers. And I stuck with one brush -- but a much more natural one. And I made a skin tone chart (well, borrowed one for Joker, made one for Rhi, since she wasn't quite represented).

And, well...

( Cut for big artz )

The several month gap also made it much easier to notice things like the fact that I had his arm on backwards. There's still a hell of a lot to do (argh, hands! How do I paint open mouths? Will I be able to fit Marvin the Martian on his sock? etc), but I feel like I'm going somewhere. I'm excited to put the deep shadows back in, but I'm going to wait until I've got a rough background so I don't wander of into the wilds of screwed up lighting. Er, don't wander off more than I usually do, anyway.

And I had a lot of fun doing it!