Portrait of Aftyn and her dog Yoko, who is apparently a very smoochy girl! I did it in Procreate on iPad with the charcoal tools. It’s a little bit of a step back in terms of developing my color sense. I started out trying to paint with gouache colors. I’ve done a little bit with that in the past, but on this I hated not just my accuracy but the overall transparency. Watercolor just may never be my thing, even though I admire artists who are skillful with it.
This might be the first piece that gets me really thinking about the color space settings I’m using. I read up on them to get a grip on what Krita was throwing at me. It was, to be frank, a bit overwhelming at first. But I found some reasonable defaults and had no problem with the results. When I switched to iPad, I was aware that it was using a different color space. The blown up version of this piece looks pretty different from how it presents on the iPad though. The value range is spread out, maybe? It makes some of the color transitions look more abrupt than intended.
I think it’s a pretty good piece. I’ve painted that necklace a few times before, but this is the first where I feel like I did it credit. My first sketch was solid enough I didn’t do a cleaner one. I had misgivings about that throughout the rest of the painting. If you watch the process video, you’ll frequently see me using the liquify and move tools to reshape and reorient things—problems I should have solved during the sketch. I was thinking about outlines and how fixable those are during painting. I should have been thinking about shapes. I did better with that on Yoko. The less familiar dog features push me into using shapes by default.
Sometimes you have to learn a lesson over and over before it sticks.
