Peter Mohrbacher

Reviving Ananiel - Colors (again)

Added 2018-05-15 14:24:17 +0000 UTC

Now we're back in color and things feel a lot more solid.

I wanted to keep the greens and browns from the first attempt at colorizing this piece, but the shift in values has moved them to different elements. This is the thing I don't think people realize about my process. The way I colorize my work forces a strong tie between the pattern light and where the colors fall within the piece. There is a tool in Photoshop called a "gradient map", which allows me to create a sort of "color grade" throughout my painting much in the same way they adjust colors in a film. This process lets me tint different values of light and dark to different colors.

By playing around with the results of the color grading tools, I get to control the paintings colors holistically, but I have less control over where each color falls within the composition. There's a lot of fine tuning involved to ensure that the colors are arranged in a pleasing way, but I'm not able place specific colors on specific areas of the painting. It's important to me to have a tool that can give me a mixture of improvisation and control. If you ever take a look at the PSDs I supply to the $10+ subscribers, you can see these color grading layers as well as some other more specific color adjustments I add later to give a few more tightly controlled color accents.