Friday, July 27, 2012

Moving into darkness

Here's an update from my watercolor adventures. Hoooo, how did I forget what happens when you try to depict a night scene with a naturally light medium? Layers and layers and layers and layers of paint later, here is where we stand:


This is the current stage of work. Everything is presumably working OK, but the light level is for a "Hollywood night" scene. We're getting to a scary point of the darkening: When do I cross the line that divides "suitably dark" and "loss of detail dark"? I mean, this is a big bright full moon night no matter what, simply because it'd be a silhouette against a night sky otherwise - but how bright am I making this moon? (The stars in the sky will be added using colored pencil or gouache, if you were wondering.)

Basically, I'm hoping this post is a normal process post and not a "where things went wrong" milestone.

EDIT: I sucked it up and pressed forward. Here is a piece I'm pretty happy with:


I color corrected this one to match the actual piece on my Photoshopping monitor, but I know from checking this blog out on my Macbook that screen brightness counts - especially in a piece that's reliant on brightness. Newer screens are probably showing this as lighter than it actually is, but I hope it's close enough for you all to get a sense of the level of light I aimed for.

8 comments:

Iron Ed said...

Came out great! Hopefully Haven will think so too. :-)

Light level is nice. I like that the face is just a tiny bit more 'lit' than the rest of the picture. Draws the eye; as it -should!-

Only question is: Does he have a tooth missing?? :-)

Jenos Ide said...

@Ed: Oh, it does look great. And now that you mention it, it DOES look like he's missing the other tooth. O.o

Christopher J Paulsen said...

The tooth is there, just lost between the shape of the jawline and a bit of sky overflow. I touched it up a bit with white pencil.

Darc Sowers said...

Very nice! I swear, night scenes seem really tricky when done with traditional media. The lack of an undo button adds that extra spice. ;P

Iron Ed said...

@Jenos...
-I- am delighted with how -your- picture came out! :-) I already have one of Chrispy's colored-pencil commissons framed and hanging on my wall. Once I've saved enough to get commissions done by a couple of other artists (Hi Darc!) I'll be back for a second from Chris too! :-)

Jenos Ide said...

@Chris: Ah. I was wondering if perhaps that's where it went.

@Ed: Nice, I don't really have any place to hang the picture up, but I'll find somewhere nice to put it. And Chris does do excellent paintings, doesn't he?

Iron Ed said...

@Jenos...
Even from my poorly worded instructions! :-) (I think I scared him. ;-))

Jenos Ide said...

@Ed: lol, don't feel bad, I think it's always hard to convey words right if you're not intimately acquainted with what they do. I know I have that problem. :D