Day 16

Whew… this one took a lot of energy to finish. Last time, I retouched the green panel instead of continuing on to the red panel.
Today it’s time for the red panel, and oooh boy were there a lot of iterations.

Lets begin with the sketches and line art.

So far so good! I put flowers in the flames because people talk about flames blossoming, and the whole new life from ashes or rebirth type of symbology.

But now, the real Trial by Fire: Coloring.
Yeah yeah, what’s so bad about coloring? Isn’t this basically a paint by numbers now that the lines are there?
To which I reply: Have you ever had your eyes lose focus? When things are blurs of color, can you tell where the edges are?
When everything is a similar tone and color then whatever you are drawing will become lost. Our brains have an auto-complete function for what our senses feed it, that’s why some artists use greyscale to make pictures with depth before turning off the filter and looking at the piece. You have a set of photoreceptors in your eyeball to detect light vs dark, then you add color on top.

I started with colors that I think of as fiery, restarting and trying different things, but it just felt off somehow.
Take a squint at that middle bottom image, the one with green and blue in it, remember what I said about values?
I realized after sleeping on it, that the thing that was “off” is the lack of contrast compared to the other panels.

Already it has become easier to read! Time to finish for good!

I love it. The gem at the bottom loses one of its tips when you squint, but the rest of it feels like flames and flowers.

Now with three down, all that’s left is purple. Can you guess what the theme is yet?