Alright, this segment is going to be probably the hardest to understand. Once I began coloring I was locked in a match to the death and rarely came up for air to document my process. Here are the results, now let me try to backtrack to mine something useful for you all. Keep in mind that layers in Photoshop are essential here and selecting those layers creates a mask(like a piece of tape over an area that you don’t want your watercolors painting) that you can paint inside and outside of if you reverse the selection.
Here’s a reasonable place to start, though it wasn’t where I necessarily began. You can see all of the characters flatted in one color, their eyes painted, and on the red carpet a dark gradient moving from the top to the bottom and a lighter gradient moving from the bottom upward. There is a middle plane of red backing it all. The one thing that makes this image pop is the circle spotlight highlighting Blue and Sloe, some of our main characters in Joe Death and the Graven Image.
That circle was made with a round brush turned to about 50% soft, placed on its own layer. This functions as the mask I will use to color in contrasting value 3 distinct layers. 1) The background, red carpet as you can see above. 2) The black line and “ink”, turning it into a color hold with its own gradient. 3) The character’s colors within the circle, warming and brightening them up.
Here you can see the color hold on ink and line, bringing it up from black and making it a deep red. Nothing within a direct beam of sunlight or artificial light remains black.
What you’re looking at here is just time-consuming color flatting, picking and choosing, and adjusting colors that are harmonious. A good rule of thumb is to start with the primary colors, red, blue, yellow, and keep everything pretty rainbow-esque. Then use the photo filter adjustment layer to harmonize all of them under a warm or cool filter. I tilted toward a green to contrast better against the red background. Take note, inside that light circle you see the colors really popping, they should be their true colors under that light and even warmed up a little.
There’s not too much to say beyond what’s been said. I will show you the final image without the border below and point out some things though. There’s a blue gradient applied to all of the characters in shadow starting at the top and coming down, as well as a warm yellow-green gradient coming from the bottom applied to the same shadow characters outside of the spotlight.
This is intended to be the back cover but I forgot to include a space for the barcode! Ugh! I’ll see what I can do with that later. Thanks everyone for following along, the likes, shares, and comments do help tremendously. I’m itching to get this book back up for pre-order and will be raving about it when it does, thank you for your patience, especially those who pre-ordered this book pre-pandemic!
Now to figure out that spine…book spine that is! Any tips out there? What stands out to you when looking at a row of books on a shelf? My inclination is to go all white with a faint grey or color for the title and publisher mark…we’ll see, and those on my newsletter will be the first to know!