PROCESS VIDEO // emergence - part 2

Here's part 2 of my process videos for Emergence, my most recent painting!

Some info about this process:

• The process has been sped up by 250% - so a bit over twice the original speed.
• This painting took me about 5 hours to make.
• The brush I used the most was the hard round brush from my own set - https://loish.net/free-goodie-bag-for-digital-artists.

RETURNING TO THE DRAWING AFTER A BREAK

I started this drawing back in July 2023, but returned to it last month. This video starts off at that moment! In JanuaryI spent a lot of time doing studies of statues and getting into the flow of capturing volumes with the hard round brush. When I returned to this drawing, I felt like it was quite flat and lacking more three-dimensionality. the first thing I did was get my hard round brush and set it to a lower flow and start to establish a clearer sense of volumes. this brought the painting back to life and rekindled my interest in it. This is why I think it's sometimes helpful to leave a painting as a work in progress and return to it later - sometimes we can bring some fresh perspective to it that helps us to it in a way that we couldn't at the time that we started it!

ENHANCING THE COLOR

Around 13 minutes in, I start boosting the color scheme. I felt like I could use some more iridescence and hue shifting to make it feel more magical. Something I find especially helpful in situations like these - going from a somewhat monochromatic color scheme to something more colorful - is to focus o the areas where lighter base colors shift to darker shadows. Basically: the edge of the shadow areas. Making those edges a bit more saturated and a somewhat different color than the base color can make the shadows feel so much more vibrant. This is something that I do at the 15:48 mark: I select the edge of the shadow on her leg and I make it more reddish. simple little tricks like that really helped to elevate this drawing to something that felt more alive and exciting to look at, even though it is still quit eminimal in terms of color.

FINALIZING THE DETAIL

After revamping the colors, it's really just a question of finalizing this painting until it looks finished. I focused on cleaning up and rendering the area around her face and hands, and leaving some areas a bit more soft and low in detail. I also tried out a bunch of different stuff to get a more magical effect on the swirls. I used some texture brushes - from a grainy brush to a rake brush - and I also superimposed some textures onto the image, specifically images of sparkles and specks of dust. Stuff like this is always trial and error for me. I can get carried away with things fairly quickly and then feel like it's taking away from the balance of my painting, so I usually add stuff and then erase it or tone it down to see if I can find a nice subtle balance. I would definitely recommend just trying stuff out at this stage since you don't have very much to lose - the majority of the details are already there and it's just about elevating them and making them a little bit more visually exciting!

I hope you enjoyed these process videos! As always, let me know if you have any questions!