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  Photoshop, Wizard Me Some ColorsApr 10, 2014 8:26 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:Welp, more digital manipulation of the watercolor colors today; it is actually painted in my usual magenta/ultramarine combo
 
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and then I went and manipulated the contrast, re-colored it with the original, less-contrasty colors to brighten it back up, then shifted its hue 180 degrees around the color wheel—but this time I used black and white gradients to control exactly where the contrasts, colors, and hue shifts took place, so for instance I only hue-shifted roughly the left side of the image, so it sort of looks like I painted it in four colors, when I really used just two. Economy! : D Also way easier to do a transition like that in Photoshop than in actual paint, I would think. : P
 
This is what those adjustment layers look like in Photoshop's Levels list, you can kind of see how the gradients shaped them—in an adjustment layer, the white areas make the adjustment, like the hue shift in the Hue/Saturation layer, while the black areas do nothing; the three black radial gradients in the second (from the bottom) Levels adjustment layer, for instance, prevent it from darkening the darker shades in Selenis as much as it does in the rest of the image, so she stands out a bit more brightly:
 
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Here are the pencils
 
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I was annoyed with myself for erasing them as entirely as I could before adding the white ink, because the painting always looks like a blobby muddle at that point; fortunately the white ink saved the day, as it often does; since I was removing the light side of the figures completely rather than leaving an outline there like I sometimes have (I painted a very light outline there over the pencils, then erased the pencils, and then whited out the fainter paint outlines with white ink), it also sort of slimmed them down from my somewhat brawny pencils, which is probably for the best; one of these days maybe I'll actually learn to pencil trim figures. I notice I also subconsciously corrected little things here and there from the pencils, like the angle of her right (our left) foot; that's sometimes an advantage in drawing over things in multiple passes; for that matter, the whole scale of the guy ended up changing—his lines were not very well preserved from the pencils, which made for some worrisome moments, but fortunately I could blot out of a lot of him using lens flare as an excuse ; ), and in the end the smaller scale makes more sense, probably.
 
 
 
 
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