Critique / Help with colorizing

[Lhune]

@Lhune

Haha, well I don't usually post pictures or drawings of myself. I know the nose is too long, but trying to fix it seemed just to ruin the painting in my eyes. I might try again. I tried to add in some subtle shading, as you are right, I saw some very subtle shading in the mirror.

I'm sure you are right, but I'm terrible at gauging color, which is why I tried to gauge by value first, and then add color. It might not be perfect, but for my first time coloring like this, I'd say it's better than anything else I've attempted. I'll have to train my eye, but that's when I've got more time... I'm a bit on a busy schedule.

Hmm, perhaps you are simply too attached to the painting? There's no such thing as "ruining" a digital painting if you think about it, you can save the individual steps, work on different layers, undo what you've done. If your purpose is to learn and not to create a pretty picture, then do whatever you think needs to be done. Don't be afraid to experiment, don't be afraid to make mistakes. Your life or career do not depend on this one picture so ruin it if you must; if it means you've learned something from it then it was all worth it.

The thing is you are not going to get better at seeing colors by (the way I see it) complicating the process. You get better at seeing colors by working with them. It's great that you're seeing improvement in this piece; at least what you're doing is useful then! But you need to let go of that fear of doing things wrong. Time has nothing to do with it, you could technically make a still life impression in 10 minutes focusing only on large color blocks. In fact that's a great exercise! You could use movie stills for that too.

Here, if it helps your confidence, below is a color impression I just did in 15-20 minutes of a titanic screenshot. It's ugly and the proportions are way off, but that's not the point of the exercise. The point is to capture and understand the colors. As you see I've still got plenty of it wrong but you'll find you get more and more accurate as you do them more often.