Pollinated 14 Part 1 [textless] (Patreon)

Apologies on the wait for these “final” images for the Pollinated series. Reintroducing myself to full renders was one thing but getting back into full renders on liquids, in tandem with the new techniques and methods I wanted to try out during my progress with refined-sketch pieces, proved making things a bit more difficult and time consuming. Hopefully the wait was worth it but I do indeed understand the frustration for something that is relatively small. Onward to the piece itself, I’ll do my best to keep the points short and to the point but I wish I could share so much! But I do understand these descriptions can drag on. One of the first challenges I faced (which is a reoccurring challenge) was trying to get dark skin tones to look more lively or colorful. In my head, I interpreted the skin tone as if it was a singular hue and only collected its spectrum of values within said hue. Foolishly, I didn’t take into account the blood/red pigmentations, how reflective of colors that bounce off the skin from ambience due to the melanin, and so forth! Lastly I forgot such a rookie, fundamental rule which was to look at real life references! Color picking real life references blew me away on how many different hues we’re present and I felt quite embarrassed not seeing and trying this earlier. So all-in-all, there is still much to learn (obviously) but I’m far more satisfied with where I’m at with understanding dark skin tones now!

Second thing I want to note on this when I was creating it was the use of new brushes that both helped me in creating sharper “cuts” in the renders when it came to muscles, folds, creases, and tight areas (marker tool), and another brush that provided both applying colors and gradation at the same time (Watercolor/Modeseven brush). Not to go too deep into detail with these brushes due to the fact that this is getting long and I essentially just said what they did, but the default marker tool started to shine a bit more during my refined-sketch colorings that left off a nice faded trail and wanted to apply in my rendered works and this came in tandem with the artist Modeseven presenting his brush settings online and wanted to try them out. Both saved a lot of time in getting what I wanted, BUT because of this, I felt I needed to apply a little more effort in getting things polished a little more due to this. ironic because I wanted to have something whether it be knowledge or tools that would speed up my processes but because I got something that aided me in this, I couldn’t get past the idea that I should clock in some more time and effort because of these tools. I’m not sure if that is foolish of me or something that is accordance in trying to improve or not.

WELP, either way, this is the “final” images and I hope you guys enjoy!