When I completed the 100 rib cage lesson, I knew I needed to take a break from instruction and just do something fun. I did a bunch of sketches, but this one jumped out at me as something I needed to polish up and complete. This is a painting of Aftyn Rose roleplaying as one of her succubus characters. It was a joy to paint. I really took care with it — no tracing, no color sampling, no training wheels of any sort. I even put a limitation on myself. All the colors used are variations on a single hue.
Many of my recent portraits have been greyscale monochrome. I figured that’s what I would do here, but using the pink of her hair as an anchor rather than grey. In the initial stages, it wasn’t coming together. I struggled to get the skin feeling right until I unlocked the saturation axis on the colors, letting in some grey.
The color space I’m dealing with when color picking is called HSV — hue, saturation, and value. They’re not quite orthogonal, but you can think of it as the 3 axes of a cube. At zero saturation, any hue will just be grey, and that’s how I do the greyscale paintings. As you move up and down the value axis, you go between white and black.
Starting out here, I picked a single hue, the top slider under the box. The axis beneath that is saturation, going between grey and a very vivid pink. And the bottom slider is value, black to white. With a single saturation, selected to represent her hair, the skin just wouldn’t read as “person”. I needed to bump the saturation way down to get her looking right.
Something weird happened then. Aside from the small bits of purple in the background layer, this whole image is just that single pink hue, but you wouldn’t know it if I hadn’t told you. It’s not like the reference, where there was plenty of purple in shadows, a little blue in the eyes. Somehow it’s completely believable as is, even in the shadows. Just varying saturation was enough to sell this hue. I’m less clear why color painting demands that, but greyscale does not. More learning needed, but a very happy discovery.
