happy munday! finally have it in me to give a little update about life and where i am with being on hiatus
no specific content warnings but i get a little bit candid talking about dealing with mental health
originally i was planning on only taking april off and then coming back around may-june so i could work on tidying up my blog assets and come back with fresh content. so, what happened to that?
the answer kind of sucks. to put it simply, i've been struggling with a really bad period of depression which i had been misattributing to the fact that i've been off my ADHD meds for months (thanks, nationwide supplier shortages).
in addition, about a month ago we had a really awful experience where my partner and i were going to foster a shiba inu with the intent of keeping her, only to bring her home and found out she was way more aggressive than either of us were equipped to handle. we would find out afterwards that the person running the shelter was a piece of garbage who verbally abused me and lied to everyone involved with the dog; luckily, we were able to get the dog to another home within a couple of days, but the whole incident combined with everything else i've been going through has left me really shaken up still.
(for clarity, i don't blame the dog at all and the person who took her in is someone i know and trust as a dog handler personally. in hindsight, we were set up for failure, but ultimately i still wanted the dog to be okay)
kind of funny trying to navigate the internet with a newfound fear of shibas (doesn't it sound so stupid?)
that's all to say i have no idea when i'll be back on the blog regularly because i have a lot i need to sort out with myself before i can even think about it. don't worry--i'm still very interested in continuing with the story and characters! as interested as i can be while my brain has me convinced that nothing is worth doing and nothing feels good anymore. you shouldn't worry about me at least, because i've been through this before and i'm committed to getting out of this rut. plus, i'm grateful to have a really good support system on my side and i feel safe here.
in the meantime, my partner still updates on @ask-boreal and i generally lurk on my main blog @deerkibble. it's been really hard for me to maintain any sort of social connection so i apologize if you've reached out to me and haven't heard from me in a long time; it's not you personally, my brain just sucks
i would ABSOLUTELY love to hear more about how you use colours for this blog i love your art
(( omg i missed this one when i was answering all those munday posts, so i'm sorry about that--but, THANK YOU SO MUCH!! <3
it's kind of hard to describe i think without going into full tutorial mode, but i can try and walk through my process!! i WILL say i got a lot of my methodology from other artists and guides throughout the years, which is the most important part of any art process! (i wish i had links to specific tutorials, but alas, social media sucks for archiving)
now, before i go any further, i'm in no way a professional. this isn't the "right" way to do things, and i certainly don't think i'm better than anyone else at this!! this is just how i do it, and my method makes me happy, so! that's what matters most!
i'm putting the rest beneath a cut, but i've documented my process for designing the palette for a new group of pokemon characters i'm working on! ))
with regards to colour palettes, the two most important things to me are contrast and unity. i'll explain both as i go!
when working on palettes i'll do a fairly quick doodle of the characters together, and then fill in their colours and markings on separate layers. i try not to put much thought into the actual swatches right now--they just need to be distinguishable!
Pesky and Baron already had their colours tweaked to match each other, but Lily and Frog (not their actual name i just haven't come up with one yet LOL) have not been. as a group, their colours look fine together, but we can bring them even closer.
i'll start with Frog (who i got as an adopt from @psychicduo <3)--i LOVE their palette, but it's darker than i normally work with, so i'm gonna brighten them up a bit.
in order to bring some colours closer together (unity!), i changed the hue value on the dark teal so it matched the hue on Baron's light blue. i don't want to change Frog's colours too much, but i applied similar changes to every other colour except the beige and the off-white (which are the same).
here's where contrast comes into play. i will say, i'm extremely anal about this in my own work, but having low contrast is not necessarily a bad thing! it's easy to visualize contrast in hue, but it's important to consider how your values and saturation may look to other people, especially for accessibility reasons. an easy way to do this is to view the colours in greyscale.
as you can see, the values of these two colours are too close, and therefore difficult to distinguish. i can fix this by making one of the colours a little lighter or darker. for now, though, i'm going to move on to the other characters.
this one's straightforward! instead of having multiple, very similar shades of yellow, i'm going to change Lily's body colour to be the same swatch as the yellow on Pesky (which is also the same one on Baron).
now, i feel as though Pesky's blue, being closer to purple, doesn't really look right next to Frog's blue-greens. i'm going to employ a trick i frequently use--the hue/saturation/luminosity sliders.
a bit more tweaking, and i have a colour that looks MUCH nicer next to the others!
at this stage, i'll admit that i'm not sure if i'm totally happy with that colour for Pesky; there are times i'll spend hours tweaking colours for one character. but, for the sake of this post i'll move along.
so here i have a choice to make: the darkest colours on all four characters can be unified better, and i have many options for how i can do that (and i should try all of them, to see what looks best to me). i can make Pesky's navy the same colour as Frog's, or vice versa; i can make Lily's purple the same colour as Baron's (in order to make the contrast between Pesky and Lily's purple better); but there's one more trick i like to do that i haven't shown yet.
do you have two similar colours, but you don't want to make one lighter or darker? blend them together!
so, using the techniques above--bringing the colours closer together, and checking the contrast between them--i'll keep tweaking all four characters, until i have a result i'm happy with. (note: most of the time, i'll make exceptions for the insides of their mouths and their eye colours--those can be whatever!)
one more thing! i love having an art program that lets me compare my current colour with my new one, especially if i have a particular swatch i do not want to change! photoshop does this, clip does this, procreate does this... not sure what others, but i'm using clip.
some additional tweaking, and here's the newest draft!
it's very likely i'll go back and make more changes, but for now, it's good to take a break so i can come back to this with fresh eyes later. :D
unfortunately i can't go back and show the exact process for picking the palettes for ask-meowscarada, but i can show you how some of these techniques were applied!
here's an example of a set of characters from my WIP project, without any notes (the designs are outdated but the colours are basically the same):
these rules don't just apply to character palettes, either--here's a commission i did last year, complete with the palette i used for both the character and the background!
WHEW... if you read through this entire post, thank you for sticking with me!! there are MILLIONS of ways to apply colour and i don't think any way is necessarily correct, but these techniques have helped me stay satisfied with the colour in my artwork for a very long time! thanks for the asking, anon, because i can go on about this for a REALLY long time... if this wasn't evidence enough LOL
(( if you see this and you drew/wrote something for me that i never reblogged--an answered ask, a gift, anything--please PLEASE link it to me!!
i promise i haven't been ignoring it, i've just been sporadically inactive. i'm going to go through and find as much as i can that i know i didn't reblog, but it's also highly likely i missed something.
i'm prioritizing finishing my star sending gift and then getting organized from there! thanks so much for your patience! ))
#the amazing digital circus
#coquette
#photography
#artfight
