A Brighter Color Palette Appears

In the interest of catching up to some new little paintings I'm working on, I'm going to combine the ink and flat color stages of Tension and Reverie into a single blog post. And as always, I'll chat about some things I'm thinking and moving through in my personal life - including ones related to this particular piece of fantasy art.

I originally began inking Tension and Reverie directly on the pencil drawing, which was done on a sheet of Bristol. (If you missed the pencil artwork, you can see it here.) But I was running into some challenges with the faces. Even the slightest misstep with a pen or brush changes how an eye or mouth looks, and this drawing has more delicate details than the more aggressive art I've done in the past.

So about halfway through the inking process I abandoned ship and started over fresh in Photoshop.

That turned out to be a very satisfying decision, giving me room to edit and re-draw specific areas as much as needed while having clear comparisons of different attempts at a face, bird, etc.

The differences are subtle, but here's a side-by-side of the pencil and ink versions of the man's face.

I did my best to replicate the texture and line width of the ink work I do on paper, and I'm reasonably satisfied with the results of that. (I actually forgot I had inked this digitally until I started writing this post. That's very different from how I feel about the line art for Moments After the End, which to me very much looks like a digital drawing.)

Detail from Moments After the End.

When it came to color, I went into Tension and Reverie expecting to use naturalistic colors. For example, I had specifically intended for two of the cardinals to be male and the other two to be female - and color them accordingly.

That obviously didn't happen.

Final color "flats" / color separations

It's amazing to me how each art piece dictates its own colors. It doesn't matter what I want or expect for the colors going in, once I'm working on it, I'm forced to adapt and give the art what it wants. The drawing for this one is a bit more flowery (literally) and high-fantasy-themed than my other stuff, and there are some lighter emotions behind it.

As a result, working in a darker palette or even a grounded, naturalistic tone just wasn't working.

Female and male cardinals.

In fact, now that the final colors for Tension and Reverie are done, it's kind of startling to compare with my other creations – it just feels lighter and more vibrant in tone. One thing I'm still on the fence about is the border, which is a major contributor to the brighter feel. I actually went back and forth on making it dark or light, as it has such a big impact on the overall feel of the art.

Here's a comparison of the two:

Update: after writing this post, I went back and re-worked the finished art using the darker border to see how it looks, and I think that was a good change. So the finished art I have posted in the Gallery is using the darker border.)

As always with these images that have a lot of objects/figures in them, it was a challenge to create strong visual separation between elements without the color turning into confetti. The (hopefully effective) solution I've found for that is to lean on two or three main colors and then bring in variations of them throughout the piece, ie a lighter or darker version or a slightly different hue.

That seemed to serve me well here.

The final art for this one is done now and I have a blog post up talking about the inspiration for it as well as the process for the final color renders. You can read that here.

Thanks for being here.

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I share process videos, sketches, and behind-the-scenes work as new pieces take shape. If you'd like to see the next stages of this world as they’re built, you can find me here:

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