Ayarane Project

Not only did I manage to paint another detective, but I even got to do Jack McCoy’s head before my Galaxy Note ran out of battery charge.

Going back to my fangirling over Yoshiyuki Sadamoto from last week, I think I could actually get behind my likening this painting to the full-color illustrations that he did that are scattered in the Evangelion manga. (I’d sure like to know what medium– digital or normal– he used for those. They’re way too slick and solid to be his usual watercolor fare. It looks like it could be acrylic paint or something digital?) Still anime-like, but so rich with detail that the line between caricature and photorealism becomes unclear.

It’s still pretty trippy what I’ve been able to pull of with the detail in the painting phase so far. Welp, I definitely won’t hesitate to tag some of the actors when I go tweeting the finished piece around. :D

Oh, the other day my mother asked me if it was more difficult to paint black people. They pose a little bit of a curveball in that most novice artists see a black person and think “oh, I’ll just use a darker brown.” Nope, it doesn’t quite work that way. (It’s a DOUBLE curveball if the person is one of those lighter-skinned types, like ICE T up there.) Depending on the lighting and highlights, there is actually a lot more yellow and peach, albeit lower saturation. The other key detail is in the lips, which tend to be more prominent and fuller than on your average white person.

When I was making the last detail adjustments, I realized I had actually gone too dark on the skin tones, but it wasn’t something I could fix by just resampling and reapplying color, so I threw another layer on top, set to screen, dropped the opacity to about 70% and put a very thin layer of bright peach on top of (mostly) the upper left quarter of the face. Fortunately that was just enough to fix it and everything was right on target. AS IT SHOULD.

After I finish Awesome McBadass Lawyer up there (again, I threw him in not just because McCoy actually did stick his fingers in a couple of SVU episodes, even if just to yell at the other layers like personal injury attorney Scott Barney, which did not diminish his awesomeness in the LEAST, but because his Awesome Factor is WELL over 9000), Dr. Warner’s probably next. Am I going to have to make a Men in Black reference with a “it be paintin’ black people in New York” tag? (Probably.)