Crimson CHOW #46 - FANTASTICAL DESERT LANDS

[Lege1]

Thanks again for your feedback Lege. I agree about working without reference; I always try to do my best without it unless I fail hard to figure something out. It's just more fun that way.

I'm not personally crazy about working with grayscale and then color. It's a fine technique, but my preference is to slap all the colors on from the beginning, since they contribute so much to the "feel" of a picture. Although this maybe leads to some overall over-saturation as you mentioned, since I like to go to the extreme corners of the color triangle, but it's always easier to dull things down later than it is to fix a lack of contrast or saturation.

The reason for the empty space is that I'm planning to put a moon and stars there, to make it look like a dry desert with a perfectly clear night sky. Not in a too distracting way, though.

Sand skull dude looks sweet. I notice there's often distortions in the backgrounds of your paintings that gives them a slightly expressionistic feel, E.G. the tilted pyramids and small palm trees here. I mean that in a good way because they sometimes make me feel like I'm having a fever dream when I look at them. Was that always a part of your personal style?

@Pubic Enemy Oh always, and yes, exactly, you get it! Working without being chained to a reference is the most fun way to work, it's just a free-flowing rage on kind of thing. If I'm not enjoying the process, it defeats the purpose of me even doing the thing. This doesn't excuse creating bad imagery because of not using reference, I'll definitely use reference where I need it.

I get what you are saying about the grayscale situation. It took me years to get anywhere with working like that. For most people the color never looks right, and always looks off when they add the color over the gray. The key in my experience is to make sure to set the color off as early in the image as possible. I usually block my values in, massage them a little to bring some of the forms out, and then go in with a color layer, and never 100% opacity. You can totally work like you're saying and now that you mention it like that, I'm excited to try creating an image just throwing the colors in and then using either a color, or saturation layer to paint out the color as needed with black. This is why I love working in the forums here because everyone seems to have different approaches and sometimes trying these approaches can be a great way to improve workflow and over all image quality.

Thanks, on the Sand Skull Dude, lol, I'm chiseling away on him, lol. I think my graffiti background contributes to my image distortion. It used to work in a very bad way, but now it seems it is working in a much better way. I like to try different things and get crazy with it. I'm a sucker for Dutch tilts, so I'm always setting things off sideways and using the crap out of diagonals in my work. I'm glad you like all that!