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Trinosaur — Blissey
Published: 2014-03-03 19:15:04 +0000 UTC; Views: 369; Favourites: 22; Downloads: 4
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a commission for LynionPoeRelated content
Comments: 7
Okay, first of all I want to say I've been enjoying your watercolors since you started posting them. They're pretty fab, and your color pallets are awesome as well (also, kudos on getting to sell your art!).
One area I think you could improve in (based on this particular picture at any rate) is the "cleanliness" of your coloring, so to speak. Not to be confused with having a muddy pallet or messy lines or anything like that, both those things are quite lovely in your work as a whole.
I'm talking in particular about the quality of your shadows and the places where the paint "leaked" into spots its not supposed to be. Its less apparent in your paintings where you have many, many layers of color, but because you've only really got two colors here it jumps out. One way I've discovered to fix that is to continue working the painting while its still wet. Just a little bit before what you might describe as "tacky" is when I get the best results (I can only assume you painted a base layer of pink, let it dry and then did the shadow since that's the look I usually get when I use that method to paint).
Another fancy trick is if your paint bleeds outside the lines, as long as its not completely dried out, you can actually erase it by rubbing the spot away with a slightly damp brush. Doing that when the wash is just a little tacky gets the best results, I find, though you can absolutely do it as soon as it happens as long as you're careful.
Last thing I wanted to mention was your digital clean up, which is something I find endlessly frustrating to get right myself. I recently found that using the Levels menu to bump up the white just enough to take away the grain of the paper in the negative space works fabulously. And if it washes out your colors, pushing the saturation up in kind seems to fix it (in my experience, anyway). Alternatively, selecting the negative space with the magic wand tool and just deleting it works as well, but only if you've been good about not having holes in your lineart (a bit of lasso tool shenanigans will reverse it if the magic wand selects a white portion of your subject).
Hopefully I haven't come off as condescending or nasty or anything (I promise it wasn't my intention if I have), I just had a really hardcore professor who taught me how to paint, and some of the tricks he taught blew my mind with how different the finished piece wound up looking from my usual.
Anyway, like I said, I'm really enjoying seeing your paintings and watching you refine your technique, and I can't wait to see more.
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You didn't come across as mean or snooty at all. I can tell you genuinely wish to help me! And I have to say, I am actually aware of many of these things. haha. I actually like the splotchy effect I achieved in this particular piece, but I was struggling today since I was using a new kind of ink, so it may have bled more than I meant for it. But yes, I am aware of level-playing and being able to push unwanted pigments away with a wet brush. I don't want to say I was lazy with this, but I felt it didn't really matter in this instance. I'm pretty happy with the way it came out. I am using this as a learning experience for all of the things you listed though. I knew exactly what I did wrong at every turn BUT it means I can do it better next time.
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Well in that case, you keep doing your thing, and I'll keep enjoying it
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AHHHHH I love it so much Tri, thank you! She's adorable AND beautiful!!
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