Check, Please! Y4 Kickstarter illustration process [part 3]

The third installment! Are you sick of looking at this illustration yet? I HOPE NOT! Today we're gonna talk a bit about flats, color-holds, shading, and finishing touches! This should probably be the final installment, but we'll see how I'm feeling at the END of this writeup. 

So, this is where we left off: final inks for the whole illustration! 

Next, comes the harrowing process of FLATS, where you lay down flat, unshaded and un-fussed colors for the whole image. Flatting can be done a few different ways, but I'll describe my own version here. 

Whatever color you happen to put down, there's a VERY GOOD CHANCE it will change in this stage (unless it's color-picked directly from reference, as with the characters' skin and hair.) I think of flats like a big puzzle and I'm trying to fit the pieces into the right holes. Unfortunately, many of those holes are very similarly sized and shaped, so there's lots of adjusting and tweaking to be done before I find the right colors for each area. 

However, because it's all subject to change, and there's lots of shading and adjustment layers to come, making the flats look fantastic on their own really isn't a priority. You're just laying down the groundwork for the rest of the coloring process. I always trust that, if a color is TOTALLY not right, it will become pretty obvious as things progress. In the end it should look relatively harmonious, but obviously unfinished, if that makes sense? Like, the colors should work, but CLEARLY you can't turn this in as the final product. 

So to recap, what I'm trying to keep in mind while flatting is: 

• Do these colors work well together? 
• Is it easy to pick out key elements of the image, or do things get lost? 
• Do your eyes go right to the focal point? (n this case, the 3 guys) 

Here's how my "first-draft" flats turned out: 

Chowder and Nursey (left and right) have dark hair and Dex (middle) has orange hair, so I wanted to make sure a: there wasn't anything else dark behind their heads, and b: Dex's orange hair and eyes stayed a unique color across the whole illustration for MAXIMUM eye-grabbing action. The colors of their clothing also contrast against the grays and greens of the background. I try to reuse the same colors as often as possible across the image (key character hues excluded) to keep the whole thing looking harmonious. 

If everything is still pretty readable at this stage, congratulations! But you're probably wondering: what's with all the lines in the background? That makes things a little hard to see! WELL GUESS WHAT: we're gonna COLOR-HOLD those babies. 

Color holds, and "second-draft" flats: 

*aaaaaaAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhh* <<< an enormous sigh of relief. 

The extraordinary power of COLOR-HOLDING, which is when you lock your pixels and color select pieces of the lineart. I'm probably over-reliant on it as part of my artmaking process, but SEE HOW NICE IT MAKES EVERYTHING LOOK?? There's just something about going from a million hard lines to soft color-holds that makes my brain go hooray! 

You can see how I've started to skew the background towards a greenish-teal bias. This will come in handy later when shadows and filters come into play. At the end of the color-holding stage, the illustration should be looking PRETTY GOOD. You MAYBE could get away with turning this in as the final, but there's still more that could be done! 

Next, shadows! Also, a final pass on flat colors to make the characters' outfits more canon-appropriate. The green on green almost threw off the areas of contrast I'd been developing, but, spoiler, it comes together in the end. 

Shadows can also work to create more contrast in an image, so here I'm using lighter, cooler, sparse shading on the midground and darker, warmer, fuller shading on the foreground. There's also a purplish shadow in the background and up top to create depth, frame the image, and bring your eye back down from the ceiling. 

All of my shadows are multiply layers, and have SOFT GRADIENTS in them, instead of being totally flat. I don't usually say never, but NEVER use gray as your shadow base. Always try to use a color, or else your image will start to look very drab. 

Here's what the shadows look like at 100% opacity, normal mode. 

Lots of pink/red shades into purple/blue. And like I said "SOFT" gradients. "HARD TO MISS" gradients. In my view, gradients work best when they add a little extra zhuzh and don't really stand out on their own. 

But STILL we are NOT done! Now it's time for FINAL ADJUSTMENTS! We'll take it group by group. This is where we're starting from: 

Foreground: added an extra Linear Burn layer of pink to red gradient at 20% opacity. Added a dark blue Darken layer at 25% opacity, as a gradient pulled up from the bottom of the image. This cuts back on the lightest lights, making the whole foreground darker and less contrast-y so it serves more as a framing device and doesn't interfere with the trio of figures. 

Trio of figures: Added a 50% Overlay gradient, reddish/pink on top and dark blue on the bottom. Added HIGHLIGHTS, a 30% Screen layer with an electric teal color because I'm kind of working with greenish lighting here. I like to do two highlight layers, one lighter on top to represent cast light, and one darker on lower lines (like under elbows, etc.) to represent reflected light (and help the dark areas stand out more. The overlay is subtle but helps bring everybody's colors more into harmony. 

Midground/Background: THE BIG ONE! I really wanted to PUSH BACK the background, so most of these filters lay over everything equally instead of being tied to the figures or fish boxes or counter. There's a normal 20% opacity layer of true blue to contrast against the red/pink of the foreground. A normal 25% opacity layer of teal coming up from the bottom to make the figures pop more. And a 25% Linear Dodge layer of purple to brighten things up. There's also a teeny highlight layer on the background figures but that was just for my own peace of mind and you can barely see it lol. I finished off the background with some adjustment layers (making it brighter, removing some contrast, taking out some red in the colors). So here's our final image! 

And that's IT! That's the whole dang thing! 

I'm 95% pleased with the way it turned out, and I think I really managed to capture the image I had in my head when I started! I've been looking at this image for hours at this point, and I feel like the background could have been a LITTLE less washed out, maybe I could've found something more interesting to do with the top left corner, and the whole picture probably needed a tighter crop. But I love drawing backgrounds and I REALLY WANTED TO DRAW THIS BACKGROUND, so the crop stays wide lol. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this series of posts! Sorry I was a little "haha, then employ this very complicated and thought-intensive overlay gradient system for extremely subtle results" at the end there, but honestly that part of my process has just come from several years of practice and experimentation. I'm sure you'll figure out a system for yourself soon enough! Maybe I'll try to go a little more in depth on that in a breakdown of a future, less complicated image! 

Jiro and Yuudai say "thanks for reading!"

-Mad