Sea dragons. Sea dragons run. Sorry, I'm tired. It was bound to happen...
Here's another little fun thing I grabbed off Nasan Hardcastle's blog. You find a picture, whether a painting or photo, your own or something that inspires you, and if it has a good value range, you shrink it down until all you have is a few pixels, then paste it into a new image to use as a color palette.
I went through some of my photos to find candidates for this, since I don't feel that confident in the values of my digital paintings. I put the corresponding photo next to the head that I took the colors from. I was going to draw different kinds of dragons with features that aren't standard for me, but I ended up only liking one of the thumbnails I did and then ran with the whole sea monster theme. I think these guys turned out well, though they pale in comparison to the color the photos have. And I'm really not sure if that green one looks enough like a dragon, or just some big, weird seahorse. I tried, I really did. You be the judge of how well they turned out.
Anyhow, let me know what you think! I'd like to slap some of my art like this on stuff that I can actually sell at places like Zazzle or Imagekind (just as examples) but I'm still trying to decide if there'd even be a market for it. There are so many dragon-y things clogging the art media anymore, I don't know how much my stuff would actually stand out. I don't harbor any illusions that my art could be a cash cow. I've seen plenty of artists who have far more training and much higher quality work that are struggling for income. But that's fine - I would only be after a small amount of income to supplement my daytime job, anyway. Ah, I'm rambling because it's late, so I'm going to stop there.....
Looks neat! So what did you learn when you did these? Did you reduce the photographs to a handful of pixels to work from or did you sample from the photos directly? What kinds of things did you notice you had to do differently when working this way in contrast to how you usually work?
ReplyDeleteYep I scaled the photos down until they had around 20-30 pixels of color left, which was so nice for choosing light and dark colors. I think that sampling colors from a simplified palette like this actually saved me time when it came to the coloring stage, mostly because I didn't have to hum and haw about what would look good or waste time with choosing tones. The colors were all right there and all I needed to do was pick one. Plus, I didn't need to worry about colors clashing, since they already go together so well.
ReplyDeleteIt was a bit of a challenge at the same time, too. Being limited on colors made me think about which pixels I wanted to use to make the eyes (or tongue) stand out on these heads. I was surprised at just how much some of the medium-toned colors pop when paired with the very dark tones.
Thanks for sharing this, Nasan. It has been pretty fun!