Taste Of Defeat (Patreon)

I’m so ecstatic to talk about this one, not because it’s like a big thing or anything in content or idea, but because of the hurdles and things I’ve learned from it. I’m going to try refraining from making an essay and just jot down the main points. I came across an artist by the name of Tsuaii and their process of coloring with ambient occlusion on a separate layer. Interested by this, I tried replicating it but I failed about 3 times due to missing elements like how to color It afterwards. I then decided to look for artists in how their colors pop in congruence with Tsuaii’s style. Much of what I found was learning how to not be so afraid of using layer effects. I usually am hesitant to use layer effect blend modes because I thought I was cheating myself from actually learning how to paint. While I still believe this is somewhat true, I tried learning to let that go in order to achieve more color bounce and contrast. Going back to the roots of creating cool shades, warm lights, and for dramatic lighting, you should work with a neutral base apparently.

As for the pose, from the WIPs you’ve heard me complain about how I kept seeing the original image as wonky in a way but I couldn’t quite see why that was the case. I went at it for weeks trying to assess it while moving onto other works to get my mind off it but nothing seemed to work. I decided to wait upon feedback from what others mentioned and although I applied them, even to the ones I disagreed with, something was just off I couldn’t really tell what it was. I got tired of wasting time trying to mentally put it together so I decided to just do the poses myself in real life, set up camera points, made mounts or benches I could use to hold myself up and see what I could do and I finally got satisfied with the proportions and perspective.

I wish I could express everything in this, it was more color heavy information that I learned but I hope I’m able to keep this method consistent in future works for I’m definitely satisfied with this outcome. Of course there needs improvements all the time but compared to what I didn’t know before, it’s a big change at least for me. Worried on how this would work with projects that needs consistency though, I feel I’ll only be able to repeat this well in singular images like these and fail miserably at sets or comics lol.