Ep. 21, Page 90

smbhax on April 9, 2014

Just like a couple days ago, I turn to Photoshop high contrast to get myself out of a painting messbut this time there's no going back and mostly restoring the painted look, because instead of just mostly screwing up one patch, I painted the whole thing way too lightas you can see in the photo of the original if you click the crossed-out “original art” link at the page's lower-left corner (it isn't for sale because I did go back and try to paint over it in darker colors, and of course this turned into a muddle : P). I'm going to blame this partly on adjusting my drawing table lighting yet againI now have my dual 15-watt lamps beaming up at the ceiling instead of down at the table, so the lighting is very diffuse and indirecteyes cool with it so far.
Anyhoo so since trying my usual adjustment of just making the scanned colors a bit darker resulted in light blotches all over from the too-light watercolor, I instead cranked it up to really high contrast, desaturated that to grayscaleso now I had black and white with dark grays, threw the darker-but-light-blotchy colored version over that in Color mixing mode only to put some color back into the dark grays, then scrolled the color spectrum from the painted ultramarine/magenta to this weird blue/green.
Next time I'll try just painting darker in the first place. : P This super-processed look is *sort* of appealing to me in that it has kind of a dark grunge-noir appearance, if you will, and lets me explore different color combinations without spending a fortune on watercolors. : PP If I hadn't had to crank the contrast up quite so much due to the original being way too light, the grunge would be more limited to neat watercolor-paper-texture patterns in the dark grays, rather than specks and streaks everywhere from pencil traces. I don't know if it's something I want to do regularly, but I guess I'll see how I feel about the next page, if I manage to paint it dark enough in the first place.
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Hey how about animals? We don't really have them in A* but for some reason I was looking at wacky animal videos today. The more on-topic one is an old “Department of Libraries” 1961 government documentary on Ham the Space Chimp, who I covered somewhat in a long blog entry years and years ago, back before I spent all my time fretting over paint; the film has that great old super-chipper-and-official type of narrator, creepily narrating horrible things the US was doing to animals in the name of science (or at any rate the Space Racecan't let those Ruskies beat us to hitting the Moon with an elephant or whatever!; you can watch Ham's star turn right here. (I found it in yet another excellent post by humanoidhistory on tumblr.)
And uh the other one, well, I was looking up actual talking animals for a non-A* story idea I've been vaguely mulling over in case I should need a story to pitch to someone, and anyway I ended up watching Ravenmania, which features a mad-professor-looking raven who seems to have been taught to speak by someone who's a big fan of Edgar Allen Poe…and maybe Pac-Man. And the raven seems to have a feline fan of his own. : o Ah, YouTube, where would we be without thee?