Ep. 22, Page 32

smbhax on July 3, 2014

Managed to do a little better on the color balancing act today, I think. The color blending on her body is wet-on-wet painting; I kinda figured out that's a handy thing in watercolor while I was painting the little smoke cloud in the right background of http://smbhax.com/?e=0022less smearing/smudgingso I can mess up pretty much all I want (I think I did about a dozen mostly hopeless drawing attempts on this page before I finally got one that looked like something) without having to worry about leaving half-erased marks everywhere, which is nice and freeing.
Digital art nerdery: with the past two pages I've used a standard gamma adjustment (middle slider in Photoshop's “Levels” adjustment window) to darken the scanned watercolors for the web, rather than just raising the blacks (left slider in “Levels”); this means the lines don't get darkened proportionally more than the rest of the image, so they don't stand out quite as much as I might have wanted, and the colors don't get as super-saturated and “pop” like they have tended to in the past, but on the other hand other dark colors don't stand out more than they should, and the whole color balance of the image is much smoother and more natural. I had to do it that way with yesterday's page, because it was painted so light, and I kind of like the more naturalistic result, so maybe I'll stick with this adjustment method for a while.