Added 1 new A* page:Okay so, think I did a bit better today than yesterday's disaster, and maybe moved slightly closer to what I would like to do. I realized after talking about loosening up the drawing yesterday that this *wasn't* just a matter of how to apply the watercolor, it has to start with the pencil work itself, so I tried to work a bit more linearly and dynamically with the pencil, holding it sideways more, getting some wrist action going, letting the pencil feel its way around a bit, make multiple lines, and so forth. Wasn't quite seeing things clearly today because now that I look back at the photo I took of the pencils
it's obvious that almost-profile had some issues, like some of the features were facing a slightly different angle than others. : P I guess I got some of that straightened out by the time I got to what I thought maybe was the point of being done with the thing
but once again little things starting bugging me, like the edge of the nose and forehead, and the sort of non-committal eye: is it open? Closed? Lit? In shadow? And I *almost* mucked the thing up trying to tweak it, but somehow the glob of white ink that built up over the eye socket from a set of misguided correction attempts just pulled off pretty nearly cleanly, which...I actually didn't think was possible—and it opened up this nice clean gradient space for a lowered eyelid. So that was a bit lucky. : o
Still too uptight with most of the watercolor application though; got to stop worrying about filling in the lines (semi-) neatly, try to get some big dynamic overlapping slabs of transparent color going. I suppose in order to be able to get started with that I should get comfortable with the idea of leaving the pencil lines mostly intact. Hm. And then I keep spending hours fiddling with the colors in Photoshop, trying to get the scanned colors to look like what my brain thinks the actual thing looks like, yet also nice and dark for the dark web page. And that doesn't really work. So I finally let them stay a little on the lighter side here, hopefully when I look at this tomorrow morning they won't strike me as washed out. : P Oh yeah and also I'm now fairly sure that my scanner scans the magenta in darker than it should be relative to the ultramarine, which is technically easy to correct, but, geez.
Trivial Photoshop discovery while fighting with the colors: setting a Levels adjustment layer to Multiply blending mode has the same effect as setting its gamma (middle slider below the histogram) to 0.50. Amaze your friends!
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