[Personal Work] Painting Experiments!

I'm on the tail end of my week off, before jumping into the next commission batch, and I've been spending a lot of it watching videos on Youtube (particularly on Marc Brunet's channel) about adding color to greyscale paintings! I've also been doing some experiments!

The first one is of my still unnamed chimera girl! I used gradient maps to add color to the grey shading, and while the effect can be super nice, I'm still having trouble figuring out how to get it to work with lots of different markings. It's why I tested this out on her, because she's got stripes and white areas and the colorful snake tail.

I also used this method to shade the print for October! I haven't posted it properly yet, because I want to include the sticker, but it was in the zip packs I posted last month! It was a lot easier, because there weren't any markings to worry about. The PSD files for both the print and the chimera girl are in the zip packs as well, so you guys can see how that method is put together!

Using gradient maps is a really cool way to add color to a greyscale painting, but honestly if there are a bunch of markings it's really tedious, so probably not something I'll do often.

The second one is of Arnie if she were an RPG character! This time I did flat colors, and then the greyscale shading on top. I used color balance adjustments and a gradient map to add a color tint to the grey shading to keep it from looking bland and muddy, and then added some detail on top and it was done! I'm actually kinda bummed that I didn't record this, because I was doing a bunch of experimenting and didn't want to do a video of me fumbling around.

I REALLY like how this turned out though! If you're on the Discord server, I posted a bunch of progress shots along the way. I might compile them later and do like a mini tutorial, maybe even posting the CLIP file with it! I'm definitely going to keep messing around with this kind of style.

As a bonus, I attached some NSFW art that was an experiment with cel shading! I was inspired by this Twitter post, and I'm really happy with the colors! I like to work in non destructive ways though, so I can go back and adjust the base colors as needed, so I'll have to work out a way to do that before I can really commit to trying out this method.

Anyways, a fun week for experimenting! Thank you guys so much for your support on Patreon, I wouldn't be able to take time off and try out new techniques and find ways to improve myself if it weren't for you!