Danonymous' Ink-Eyes - redux
Still lingering around Tumbr - and sometimes I have something I can actually post without the Tumblr-gods striking me down with great fury and vengeance. Latest coloring of another Danonymous Ink-Eyes. Here not just her eyes are giving off evil red evilness too.
Real reason I wanted to post this is I did the shading in a radically different way than I usually do. Is it better? Worse? Shrug. It's different. That's all I can say for sure. You "real" artists already know this method I'm sure, but I've not really used it before.
So I started with Danonymous' original of course. (he actually had it as black lines on a dark grey background - but judicious use of Photoshop's Exposure adjustments fixed that right up!)
Next, standard flat-colors (I just copied from my original Danonymous Ink-eyes that I still have the .psd file for) Also ignore the mask color towards the bottom. I screwed up but it looked good so I ended up keeping the screwup.
Now here's where things start to deviate from my normal method. At this point I copied this flat-color layer, shifted all the colors towards blue and darkened them. As the color-gurus say, shadows tend more towards blue, so I just moved everything towards blue.
Now, it wasn't originally that radical. I mean, that's practically an almost-black on black lines. Originally it was just a LITTLE bit darker and bluer than the first flat-colors layer. But as I continued working on it, when I came up with the background it kept looking better DARKER, so I ended up much darker for this second layer than originally planned. So what's the deal with these two layers?
Layer mask.
I've long been aware of layer masks. I just haven't USED them much. But now I understand better why they are the preferred method. So this is the layer mask attached to the darker, "shadow" layer. And that layer is over the top of the normal flat layer. This is NOT the "shadow" layer - it's the layer mask FOR the "shadow" layer. Why is that important?
Well, if you just made a flat, normal grey layer and stuck it over the top of the flat layer, you COULD just erase parts of the flat grey layer with a soft eraser and then naturally see the flat colors underneath. It would effectively do the same thing. BUT... what if you later wanted to put back some of what you'd removed? (important when doing those little muscle areas btw!). You can't just "paint" it back in if it's actually colored. Well, you might be able to, but it would be a huge headache.
Instead, a Layer Mask let's you vary the transparency of the top "shadow" layer so you can let part of the underlaying layer show through - but it's non-destructive to the "shadow" and underlaying layer. You can "play" with the transparency. Anything you color black in the Layer Mask will be 100% transparent showing the underlying layer. Anything you color white will be completely opaque, showing none of the underlaying layer. And grey, of course... let's some through.
The important point though is you haven't touched either color layers! You just changed the transparency of the top layer. You can put it back (color the layer mask black). Or make it a little more/less transparent (color darker or lighter grey in the layer mask).
It's not a magic bullet, but I understand now why it's useful. Because of the non-destructiveness to the top and bottom layers! And that's cool!
That's most of all I wanted to say here. But I might as well show the rest of the progress. With flat color layer under the "shadow" layer and the layer-mask on the "shadow" layer applied, I get this:
Not sure I'll keep using this method, but it does work well and I bet most all pro artists use it basically like this.
So I decided I'd do another moonlit Ink-Eyes with dark background...
The rest was pretty standard stuff really. "Shine" layers set to Color Dodge for shiny butt, shiny hair, shiny spear handle etc. A highlight layer over everything for that eye dot (I find color dodge shine layer doesn't work well for highly saturated colors so I literally paint over them directly.) The red was an Outer Glow on the flat color layer, but then I separated the Outer Glow into a Rasterized layer of it's own and then applied Motion Blur over it. Gave a pretty cool effect. A %30 transparent layer for reflections (on spear handle reflecting her legs, on bikini top giving some reflections too, though primary purpose there is just to not let her boob-edge get lost in the dark background.)
So I still am learning new methods. Why did it take me years to "discover" layer masks? Frankly because I didn't need them. But I do like how this came out so I might use them more than "painting" shadows in.
