Sometimes I think I'm getting better at choosing the color palettes for my dark fantasy surrealist art, and then I get to an image like Moments After the End (or the previously completed Ascension), and it just feels like such a lengthy and challenging process to get things dialed in.
When I was making the drawing for this one I imagined I would go with a predominately green color palette, but green just feels like a soothing and peaceful color to me. It's too nice, and it just hasn't quite made sense with anything I've made in this series of horror-curious art I've been working on over the past few years.
So bit by bit I shifted the colors away from greens and yellows over to blues, until this eventually ended up being mostly blue and purple. Ultimately, I think these colors match the quiet, peaceful, and slightly sad feeling of the drawing itself and I feel very good about where I ended up. But holy hell, it was a struggle to get here.
At one point I texted a work-in-progress image to a friend and I recently went back and grabbed that image to compare. It's always amazing to me to see how far the color palette travels before it gets to where it needs to go.
At the time I sent that image I knew I didn't love it, but I had already been looking at it so long I couldn't tell where I wanted to go from there. So, as I often do with working out the color, I set it aside for several weeks. (That was also partly because I was feeling very inspired to work on the pencil art for A Tale of Tension and Reverie, which I focused on during that time.)
When I came back to color with fresh eyes I was able to make some rapid changes and get it 90 percent of the way home, and then just chip away at it a little bit each day until things started feeling balanced.
I'm most of the way through the rendering process for this one now, just adding highlights and lighting effects, which are always among the last (and most time-consuming) things I do for an image. Here's a little teaser for how that looks.
I'll have the finished color art to share sometime early next year.
I often add some thoughts about life stuff at the end of these, but I feel like I wrote a lot (perhaps too much!) in my last post and would like to keep it short this time. But as always, thanks for reading, and if you enjoyed this type of work-in-progress post, follow me on Instagram and consider subscribing for email updates. Cheers until next time!
Wow there's a big difference between greens and blues. You def made a great decision going with the blues/purples. I love how it emphasizes the red of the cardinal even more!