On Digital Color Studies

Today I spent some time on a color study of yesterday’s vertical compositional idea. I stole the first color study and dropped it onto the vertical sketch, and then tried expanding the color study. This was tougher than the first one, as I didn’t have a direct reference for the higher layers of trees. I went back through the images of the forest table, used the bits of information I could find, and then made up the rest the best that I could. I’m not usually great at making stuff up - I need some solid real-life material. But the beauty of digital sketches and compositions is that it’s super easy to  undo the mistakes. If I go too far down a conceptual path that doesn’t work and can’t be tweaked to fix it, I can always completely undo it. 

I think that is the one thing that I actually really like about digital painting. It would’ve been terrible, I think, to learn to paint digitally and then have to un-learn that particular habit when switching to traditional media. This type of quick(ish) iterating seems to be the best use-case scenario for me, and I’m trying to take more advantage of it. And honestly, I do really need these mental exercises that push me outside of my comfort zone. Pushing my brain to model the light and environment abstractly is good for me. And a side benefit of not being able to see the reality is that I can focus more on the compositional aspects of things, and then forcing reality to conform to the design. I really like the way this turned out.

I also tried putting some plates and glasses and food on the table, to see how it looks. It kinda changes the vibes of the painting a bit. I feel like it makes it feel even more magical-fairy-forest than it did before.