@unicorngumdrop

Peindre

hi! i have a follow-up on the second part of your post! you mentioned decreasing the amount of deeper shadows outside the focal point, and that’s completely fair. my earlier comment referenced the saturation blend mode, but another blend mode that you might find useful for the effect that you want is the multiply blend mode (or really, any blend mode that has a darkening effect). with the multiply blend mode, you can pick any color that’s in your illustration (often, it helps if it’s already a common color that you’ve been using throughout the piece, as that will tend to make your image more cohesive) and then just airbrush in darker values broadly over the entire piece (except for the face and bust area). this broad-strokes approach allows you to darken basically anything you want without adding more rendering detail (and you can use the lasso-selection tool to ensure that only the parts you want darker are affected by the multiply layer). for this draw-over, i’ve made sure to point out the darker varieties of each hue that result from using multiply. i chose the color of the character’s shorts to to multiply over everything except for the face and more prominent shoulder area, and the draw-over that i’ve included is the result; the face looks brighter by comparison even though all i actually did was to darken everything else. in case my explanation of the logistics weren’t clear, here’s a quick review of the steps that i took: (1) i picked a color that’s prominent in the illustration; (2) i selected the “airbrush” as my pen of choice; (3) i created a layer on top of the original artwork and changed that layer’s blending mode to “multiply;” (4) i used the selection tool to select everything except for the character’s face and more prominent shoulder area; and (5) i used a few strokes of the airbrush (at maximum size to minimize the number of strokes required) to multiply the chosen color on top of all the original colors of the illustration. this darkened the illustration everywhere except the face and more prominent shoulder area, making both of those areas look brighter by comparison. please let me know if you have any follow-up questions. i’m also happy to send you a step-by-step video showing what i did to apply the multiply layer, in case my explanation wasn’t clear. i hope this helps! ❤

@unicorngumdrop

Peindre

this is a really nice illustration, and the fact that this is your first completed digital painting makes it even more astronomical. sincerely, congratulations, my friend! since you mentioned values, i thought it might be helpful to share a digital painting trick. while some programs allow you to see a map of the range of values that you use in a particular illustration, not all painting softwares allow you to do that (and certainly, not all of them allow you to do that for free). but a trick that i’ve learned for instantly checking the values and seeing how much they contrast with the other values around them is to add a pitch black layer on top of your artwork and then set the black layer’s blending mode to “saturation.” as long as that layer is turned on, your entire illustration will be grayscale and will show the relative darkness or lightness of all the values in the painting. i use this trick a lot to check values (though i could probably stand to get better about checking them while i’m still in the sketching phase 😂😂😂), and i can definitely say that it works very well for assessing diversity of color values and appropriate levels of contrast. i’ve included a draw-over to show what the illustration would look like with a pitch-black saturation layer applied. based on the values shown, it looks like you were very effective at brightening the face, though the other brighter areas of the arms and legs may draw some attention away from the desired focal point. with a black saturation layer, you can more easily determine what the current color values are and which ones you might want to change. i hope this helps! ❤