Day 48

Laid in the flats of the illustration

But... I think I am going to put this illustration on hold. I am just not enjoying it at all, I've been a lot less productive and I don't think that I will be learning anything from the painting phase at the same time, except for building the discipline to push through uninteresting things. The drawing phase was very valuable however, I gained confidence in my ability to draw characters from tricky perspectives and also how to fix scale issues.

I feel like I won't learn much from painting it because I don't know enough about how colors work and don't have the required references to learn by eye and trial and error. With values, I can work from imagination decently and have a sense of direction, but with colors, I will just end up doing random stuff and I am not really the type of person that likes to learn that way. I like to work based on theories and those theories either come from experts or through my own experiments and reflections.

I do love to experiment, but to combine that with an illustration that is already complex in itself is exhausting. When I experiment, I like to do quick paintings instead. Sometimes, that is only a few brushstrokes and if I want to learn by experimentation, that is the way to go for me.

Such as today! 

After coming to the realization that I really need to work on my color fundamentals, I purchased a color video series from Ctrl+paint and ended up testing out the relationships between value, hue and saturation. It's been eye-opening and will be posting a few of the findings soon. (nothing new, it's been told in the videos as well, but information sticks better when you test things out yourself and come to the same conclusion)

I will probably be doing still-lifes in the upcoming days to work on my eye for color and its relationship with value and saturation. I feel like... I will be able to learn this stuff quickly. It's probably naive of me, but oh well, not going to talk myself out of being confident in my ability to learn ;)