Ep. 21, Page 61

smbhax on Feb. 26, 2014

Warning: more watercolor blathering today!
Lately I've been spending more time on the penciling stage

trying to make sure there's something to them and they aren't just sort of bloated and cartoony, which is how they tend to come out if I'm not paying attention. : P And I was all happy with how the initial, wet-on-wet layer, which I've been calling the “underpainting” for the sake of convenience, went today

and once again I was thinking hm that could almost work on its own, maybe with a few white ink touch-ups here and there. So I did a test scan of it (no white ink yet), but after doing this I was reminded that it's difficult to use a watercolor that light, because you have to darken it a lot so it doesn't look washed out the screen, and that brings out all the little artifacts in it and it comes out fairly grungy, even if you keep it on the light side of things

So that probably wouldn't have worked. Which is too bad because it would be the best way to preserve all the zip of the pencils, rather than kind of having to redo them in paint, and the underpainting itself tends to be kind of zippy, since it has to be done pretty fast, before any part of it starts drying. But on the plus side, this little investigate did help explain to me why I haven't really been able to recapture the dark richness of http://smbhax.com/?e=0021 if I needed a purple area, I just laid on some red over a wet blue layer. This I think worked pretty well, kind of kept the colors a little more vibrant–and would be particularly good for the underpainting, I figure.
(Hm I guess the other thing with page 55 that let it get kind of dark and rich was that the figures are seen mostly in shadow, and at least somewhat against dark backgrounds, whereas since then I've mostly got them from more directly lit angles, or against white backgrounds, which makes it trickier to get that swirly dark look.)