@unicorngumdrop

Peindre

(part 2 of 2) your post mentioned the relationship of the clothes’ and the feather’s values relative to the rest of the piece. one way to help heighten the contrast between these elements and their environment would be to lighten the clothes and feathers while darkening the background. to combat the similarity in values, i used 2 additional layers. the first is a layer set to the multiply blend mode. on this layer, i used an airbrush to darken the brown parts of the background using the character’s skin color; and rather than simply overwriting the hue from brown to blue, the multiply effect simply darkens the color without completely changing it (there is a somewhat bluer tint to the brown now, but the brown is not completely gone; this changes things more subtly, especially because the airbrush is naturally a more transparent brush anyway, helping the character’s blue vibe to be reflected more in the background as well, which hopefully adds even more cohesion to the piece). for the second layer, i set it to the add blend mode and used a selection tool so that it would only color the clothes, hair, feather, and skin. on this layer, i again used the airbrush; but since it’s on an add layer instead of a multiply layer, the airbrushed blue brightened the selected elements rather than darkening them. overall, the goal was to help differentiate the foreground from the background while also helping push the cohesion in the illustration even further via use of the same color (the character’s skin color) for both the multiply and add effects. like i said in my first post, you have a really cool design here. i hope my suggestions are helpful! ♡

@unicorngumdrop

Peindre

this is a very cool illustration with lots of style and an almost cozy feel to it. great job so far with communicating a somewhat more muted and introspective tone while also adding in a dash of the more fantastical. in order to provide 2 draw-overs, i’ve split my feedback into 2 parts. here is part 1: (part 1 of 2) so one way to quickly check the values of your illustration (and to spot areas where similar values may be overlapping and decreasing the readability of the artwork) is to create a pitch black saturation layer and put it on top of your illustration. i’m this draw-over, we can see the values of the piece. the clothes have a similarly dark value to the brown portions of the background that they are covering, making those areas of the illustration a bit more difficult for the viewer to easily distinguish. the same is true for the feather, whose value makes contrasting it from the brown background more challenging. this may be the reason why you felt the values were a bit off, but the saturation layer makes it easier for us to pinpoint exactly what areas could benefit from adding more contrast. (more on that in part 2, with the second draw-over).