Beach Commission colours

[Yann]

Had some trouble with the PSD files so ended up colouring this multiple times, that was frustrating but it's finally finished. Totally cell coloured style, I usually mix a bit of gradient or something with sky and so forth but decided to keep it all perfectly consistant for this one.

Pencils: http://baby-marshmallow.deviantart.c...cils-122714670
Inks: http://baby-marshmallow.deviantart.c...inks-136276339

The greyscale tone reference I did before the colouring seems to have some charm, some of which I don't think transferred over to the completed coloured version.



With the colour flats I didn't notice but now with the completed image I'm wondering whether I should have made the flowers a different colour to cut down on the abundant blue/green in the image a bit. The character colours were all decided by the client but I had free reign over the background and environment, what do you think?


Nevith is (c) Asha Francis

Anyways, thanks for looking

[Symson]

Excellent work I don't think you should change the flowers at all. The color helps to keep then in the foreground and give a nice sense of space to the art.

[Genesis]

Awesome!
I think some of the issues you have with the color version verses the gray scale can be actually be seen in the gray scale. There doesn't seem to be enough tonality difference (is that a word?). So, for instance, his face and hair are the same darkness/lightness. The same with the face, hair, sky, tree and parts of the water.

Brightening and darkening some of the layers should solve the problem of the charm that's lost in translation between the grays and the colors.

[Yann]

The greyscale is purely a guide for colour/shadow/highlight placement, I do it for pretty much all my images and it's not really intended to be shown, I only put it up in this case because of the 'charm lost'. I actually don't really think of it as 'greyscale' and instead call it 'clay' because it reminds me of how clay models look before you colour them. If I darken the background more to make it stand out like the greyscale wouldn't that draw focus away from the focus of the image? the character? also it's not really 'realistic' that way (not that cell colouring is by any nature realistic, but still).

Oh well, I'm warming up more to the colour version vs the grey version bit by bit so there's a chance I won't even remember this in a few weeks.

Thanks for taking the time to look and respond.