Hi. Today I’m going to share a story of a picture.
So, I’m doing those combined prompts, and the most recent was: 1) an ornate magic book that is bound with a lock; it glows with purple fire. 2) He breathed deeply, letting the familiar power envelop him.
And I drew this picture:
And I was not thrilled. Most of all I didn’t like how shallow the color pencils are on this, and making them more saturated required too much elbow grease. Also, I wasn’t happy with the pose. So, I went and sketched a buch of references:
From that, I made this watercolor:
And it worked better for me, but I still couldn’t make the book glow purple, and I was also very confused about the skin tones.
So I went through more reference and threw together a photoshop mock-up:
That gave me some guidance, but was still difficult to translate to a traditional painting:
And part of the reason was that my W&N Cotman watercolurs come with now purple and only a dark cold red, so mixing the purples was quite challenging. So, today I went a bought a bunch of pans. And of course I didn’t just buy the pans, but a ton of other stuff as well.
And then finally I sat down and made this (and it’s a different pose because I was tired of drawing the same one for the third time:
And it still doesn’t glow purple!
So, I guess what I wanted to achieve is something like this (and it’s edited digitally), but I have no idea what I should do to achieve it.
