Hi Jez!! First of all, I would like to say that I LOVE your art so much! I've been following you since the days you were obsessed with AkiHam and made me buy P3P just to play with her, hehehe~ Your art is so inspirational!! Could you explain a little bit more about the underpainting process on digital, please? Do you lower the opacity on the flat colors and after that you merge it so it gets a bit of the underpainting color? Or is it another way to do it? I get the idea on traditional painting but I can't get it right on digital for some reason T___T
hi! thank you for the kind words and continuous support!! ðŸ˜
to achieve the best results with underpaintings, i would suggest a semi-transparent brush and slowly build up color from there! like so:
before anything else, when painting digitally, it's good to remember this: pigments mix naturally in almost all traditional mediums! but this doesn't happen as nicely on digital because instead of pigments mixing, the colors simply overlap one another. this is one of the reasons why it's easy for digital paintings to lose vibrancy and look muddy.
so you will have to manually pick colors to retain its vibrancy while you build up your colors while rendering. a quick way to alleviate this is to eyedrop the middle point of the two colors and ramp up the saturation and hue
but this also has its own fallbacks as you might lose color value (also important to make your paintings retain vibrancy) if you're not careful! doing it this way is frequently inaccurate as well, so use sparingly! i encourage you to try and manually pick the in-between color instead as it also helps you practice your color intuition.
i'm telling you this because you will most likely run into this problem of your colors gradually looking blander as you keep layering your colors over the other if you don't adjust them as you go.
as for my process itself, what i tend to do is lay down my local colors in the bare minimum, just so i get a general sense of what they are in my paintings. this way the underpainting still seeps through more naturally. look at this, this is pretty much the "flat color" i laid down
after this i lay down a rough sense of the shadows i want, merge it into a new layer and start rendering from there. i personally try not to overrender it because like i said earlier, the more i layer the colors the muddier it gets and i don't want to cover up the range of colors i've made by eyedropping.
hopefully, you get the idea!
