February 28, 2013

Reign of Winter parts 2 & 3

Covers for Pathfinder's Reign of Winter: The Shackled Hut, and Maiden, Mother, Crone. I kept the palettes limited, even the warmest hues were mixed with a little blue to maintain a very cold feel. Art direction by Sarah Robinson, cover design by Andrew Vallas.


Grayscale




Color



The finishes turned out very close to the approved sketches. The winter witch's face looked a little odd, so I completely repainted it in color, and the centaur's war hammer needed to be redesigned to match a previous reference.


Final Composites

9 comments:

  1. Amazing stuff, man. I told you this already, but I love these.

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  2. Great illustrations. It is interesting to see the covers broken down to the individual pieces. How do you go about colorizing the grey-scale paintings? Do you have a set process for that step?

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  3. Thanks again!

    Lance- I convert the image to RGB, duplicate the grayscale layer (keeping it as the background layer for value reference), then apply a 10-20% color filter to the top layer (image→adjustments→photo filter). This adds just a little bit of base color, kinda like a thin wash. After that I use a large brush in color mode to establish the overall palette, then smaller brushes in normal mode to smooth transitions and polish details.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you so much for answering my question. I was curious to hear because I have been using monochromatic underlays in my painting process too. But when I've went to colorize them I always seemed to lose a lot of the initial values I had established and it feels like I always end up doing all the value work twice. I have not tried messing with brush modes yet, only been changing entire layer modes (mainly color, normal, & multiply). I will have to begin experimenting with brush modes. Thank you for the insight.

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