do you ever think about how if you dive into the ocean and go deeper and deeper you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light, and if you go up into the sky and go higher and higher you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light
sometimes a post makes you get out of bed at 230am to spend a quick hour on something like this
[Image description: A color image in portrait orientation. The background transitions smoothly from a starfield on black at the top, through dark blue, medium blue, lighter blue, then back to medium, dark, and another starfield at the bottom. In the very center is a black silhouette of a human figure, appearing to float on its back as on the surface of water. Above it in the blue “sky” area are a curved, thin white line like the contrail of a jet aircraft, and two small black silhouettes of seabirds. Below in the deep dark blue, just before the starfield, are some silhouettes of fish. /end description]
I got some request for my process with backgrounds after the Onsen, so this will be a step-by-step-ish doumentation for an American Southwest landscape.
BIG. ASS. CANVAS. like at least one side should be 5000 pixels
Get a shitload of references:
Yeah 42 is enough
3. Rifle through them and sort into ones that feel related to you, or have elements you want to collage together. Make a note of this part on the tumblr post to explain where the fuck you are for the next 6-10 hours.
4. Or, uh. Seventeen minutes. Kinda slapped and scaled them in approximately the size and location I want them.
5. Now I’m gonna spend an outrageous amount of time isolating the exact thing I want from these references and Paper-dolling theminto place
Side note: You want to keep all the references from as close to the same perspective as possible. This is a pretty flat front-on angle so that’s not hard but something on a hill is a BITCH.
6. Okay, now I have everything in approximately the size and location I think I want it to be. All the pieces are on different layers, so I’m going to sketch the individual layers and tweak them into place and sorta quilt them together into a coherent Outline.
These are totally real technical terms.
7. This outlining art Takes A While ™. 3 hours in so far.
It’s worth it tho, not because I’m using the outline as much in the final composition, but this intensely studied loutline helps me get REALLY familiar with the shapes of everything, which is REALLY important when I pick out my Light Source, because I’m going to have to wholesale invent the shading.
Six hours of Linework in!! Stopping for the night so my hand remains functional :)
Took most of the day off on my hand, but another 4 hours and the Linework is DONE. (you know, except for the zillion edits I’m going to make while I’m working on it but hey)
Since The Onsen piece used a lot of very cool, dark, and desaturated colors, I’ve decided to use a lot of warm, high-key and very saturated colors in this piece.
Now, those are THE most saturated versions of the hues I want to use, and they’re there mostly for me to Eyedropper and pick tints/shades from on the color wheel, but a few notes:
The foliage is going to be orange in the foreground, then getting redder as it goes into the Background, and finally pink on the far mountains. this is because while this is some Bizarro Alien dreamscape, colors in the distance will be bluer because blue light gets scattered the least as it approached your eye.
Similarly, this will have the shadows done all in one color (A very dark blue-purple on low opacity) because this a day scene, and the sunlight is the same all over, so the shadows will be approximately the same color as well.
The Onsen had two different-colored lightsources, which was really fun, but for daylight, you tend to only have The One Bid Solar Light Source, and because it’s full-spectrum, the highlights are more or less invisible and you see it through the shadows, if that sentence makes any sense at all.
Bonus Pro tip: Label all your layers.
Step IDK 9? 10?
Once you have a palette concept, go right ahead and slather that shit on as a Proof-Of-Concept:
So this is no where near the actual saturation or value the final piece will be, but its go for deciding what elements are going to be what colors, which I had a pretty good Idea of, but I actually ended up moving the plant colors around a whole bunch.
The Fortress definitely needs to be broken up more, as well as making clearer distinctions on the cliff about what is a shaded surface vs a stained one.
Once again, I’m going to let it rest overnight to give my hand a break and let mt subconscious make suggestions.
11. Next bit is to reduce the saturation on the rough and zoom in on one section to refine the colors. It’s a bit like filling in a coloring book.
