I'm about ready to scream.

[ZombieChinchilla]

Okay, so I've been working on this painting for about a week now, and it's driving me up the wall.

The idea was to do a fantasy-ish painting, with a girl holding her hands around a floating, glowing, artifact that I decided to make a necklace. I'm yet to actually draw it, but I think you can guess where it will be. I want the necklace to be glowing and covering everything with a bright, red light. First I did a grey underpainting and then added color with an overlay layer, but everything I've tried hasn't worked and I've about given up.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, with regards to color, light, or anything else.

Greyscale:


With a red overlay layer:


Thank you so much in advance!

[Wardy]

Ok first off, without an anatomically correct underpainting, whatever colour you add will look wrong, so lets get that sorted to begin with.
The eyes should be one eye width apart, and should be approximately in the middle of the head. I would alter the jaw line to make it more feminine, look up some references.
Have a look at some tutorials on proportions of the face and study them, then rinse and repeat.
The mouth should be wider- imagine there is almost a triangle between the bridge of the nose, passing through the outer edge of the nostrils and ending at the edges of the mouth.
The eyes should be less crossed as well. I would also define where the hands are coming from.
As for colour, i usually do a layer on 'soft light' mode, i find that works pretty well. I would see if you can bring in a complementary colour in the background somewhere, such as edge lighting on her head of blue? Give it a go, or it will easily become monotonous.
Just my pennies worth, i hope i didnt come across as harsh as its all for improvement! hope it helps :)

[Michael Syrigos]

OK, besides the drawing problems Ward mentioned, there is a problem with your understanding of "red" light.

What I mean is that making a greyscale underpainting, then turning the painting into tones of some kind of red (there's many reds) won't cut it if you haven't got a concept in your head. Also, you have to understand light in a basic way and have a clear concept of the quality of light you want your image to have. This comes with experience and with reference. Not all red lights work the same way and there's more to red light than just painting stuff red.

Take these images for example

http://rlxphotography.files.wordpress.co...ww-600.jpg

http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/p...rkroom.jpg

http://www.unbecominglevity.com/_photos/red_light.jpg

The first is a nice photolab with some red light. Notice how everything is flat, the same red light. You see some tone in the darker halftones and after the terminator the darks are all virtually black. And look at the light bulbs and speculars on the clock, the table and that thing (whatever it is), they are a dull greyish pink.


The second one is a yellow-orange light, it colors the wall an orange color at the hottest spot and falls off to bright red and to darker red, less saturated than the first image, but warmer, and more tone variation.

The third is a red light bulb to advertise our pretty lady Charlotte the Harlot if you're familiar with the Iron Maiden song. Now the light here is white... Not the lightest white, somewhat grey, but almost white. It colors the objects near it a yellow tint, kinda grey, falls off to an orange, almost as light as the yellow, more saturation tho (ie not a tint) and then to a bright red, much saturation, as light or less than the previous two for sure (it APPEARS lighter due to the saturation, the chroma) and then darker, and black.

What you have to understand here is spectrum and photon energy. Yea weird I know, but that's a more tangible and easy way of understanding it. You see, each light in these examples emits a very specific range of colors, a specific range of energy. This energy has a particular behavior, it has a specific look at it's source, the hot spots, light areas, halftones and darks. You must study how it colors the world at various angles and distances, even how it interacts with the local colors of objects. You would never see a blue in there because even if you put a blue in the image, the light emitted has no blue in it to be reflected, so what you will see will be black (because most of the red will be absorbed) plus what ever red light bounces off the light and specular areas of the material.

Which brings me to the second part of what you need to look into...your materials. Painting red skin won't make the dude look like he's hit by red light. You have to check how skin reflects light and think how this material behavior will interact with a pure red light. There's parts of a face that look "bluer" or "greyer", so what will they look like when they are hit by a red light that has no blue in it? What about areas that are naturally more red? Will they look "redder" or "whiter" (meaning closer to the light source color).

Also, the fall off, depending on distance and angle will change with a pure red light. Look at the limited range of tone most of these images have...half your greys must become darker. Your darker tones must become black.

Lastly, there is a question of the way you have rendered this guy. There are planes in the original that are just too dark. For instance, your jaw and hands should catch more light, so should many of the frontal planes of the face. It's a huge temptation to wing it and use the imagination, we all do it, but you need to know more of how this works before going for this, and that comes with practice from life. And use reference, there's nothing wrong in doing so, in the end, the viewer sees your image, not your creation process.


My advice is, use the light bulb image for reference, and redo the image, with your range of reds instead of a black and white underpainting. Don't use a color picker to pick up colors from your reference...look and try to understand the tonality and color in your reference, and translate that to what you are painting. It's better to do this 2-3-4 times, make 4 crappy images, but learn and understand at least a few things, than to just remake it with accurate colors from your reference, even if the end result is better.