Israfel, Shadow of Perfect Bliss - (Color Phase) (Patreon)

Bang! Colors!

I'm using Albert Beirstadt as the muse for this one. He's had a dozen or so paintings in my reference folder for ages, so I'm long overdue to create a painting with that iconic pastoral look to it.

Doing creative stuff is a joy. Not being musical myself I can only imagine the pleasure musicians have messing around with their instruments. If it's anything like the way I feel about making paintings, I bet it's pretty good. That super positive mood is what I want to achieve with this painting.

Technically, I'm taking a little bit of a different approach with this piece. Normally, I lean pretty hard on my tools that create color across the whole piece (gradient map, color adjustments, etc). That can create the illusion of local color in some instances, but it's really tough to assign specific colors to specific elements (blue skies, green grass, etc.) unless each of those elements has a discreet portion of the value range.

Sorry if this is absurdly technical.

Typically, I do add a bit of 'local color' to pop out discreet areas of color for specific elements using a 'hard light' layer to glaze in the hues. On this painting, most of the color is coming from that 'hard light' pass. That gives it that more colorful look overall. The balance of how much I use gradient map versus color layer is often the defining factor on whether or not one of my paintings looks brighter or more moody. This is about as bright as I go and I'm loving it.

I hope you love it too!