Admin Post: Community Check-In for December (Sorry it's a day late, guys)

[goss]

Yesterday was the last day of the month (and year!), and we'd love to have you check in and chat with us. How have things been with you?

Did you get a chance to take part in any fandom activities in December, or have you been working on any personal art projects? Are you currently trying to meet a deadline? Feel free to share upcoming challenges that have got you excited, any frustrations you've been experiencing, possible goals for the next month, New Year's Resolutions, etc.

Also, I would like to take this opportunity to say THANK YOU to you guys for your friendship, encouragement and support, and for making this community a joy to be a part of. *hugs everyone* Happy New Year!

Comments

[syntheid]

Underpainting actually comes from traditional art, not digital. Oil (and I think sometimes acrylic? but definitely oil) painters also use underpaintings. Either just to unify your palette color scheme (traditional paintings typically do an underpainting in either a monochrome or duochrome but not the pure greyscale that I'm using) and create a starting mood, or as kind of a painting sketch to block out values and form. Basically the underpainting in traditional art peeks through your painting to unify your palette and helps set the mood for the painting as well as reminding you how the painting is proportioned and where you wanted to put your darkest darks/lightest lights.

Specifically in digital, though, a technique for coloring to help really push contrast is to completely detail your painting in greyscale first and use layer blending effects to color it. I don't really like this method typically because I find picking colors through the layer blending to be kinda unintuitive (the color I pick is not how it lays down when it 'glazes' over different values), and I actually don't have a problem getting higher contrast while using color but. Really why I'm doing it this way is that I need a lot more practice understanding how to render form with value and how certain colors map to values, so I wanted to hobble my color crutch and force myself to get a higher contrast out of pure greyscale.

Does that make sense? Sorry infodump.