Rules are meant to be broken

Last week I started sharing the process for painting the coloring page samples for my kickstarter stretch goal.  The plan was to color 4 sample pages from the book for KS backers to look at as examples and as a a video process on how I colored them.

The rule I set for myself was that I because these samples are to be used by those mostly likely using traditional media to color, I wanted to avoid using my go to digital painting methods like adjustment layers, and use of overlay, multiply, and soft light layer modes.  I was going to paint using just opaque colors like one would when traditionally coloring.  That means no special layers, no digital effects, just straight color on standard normal layers.

Well as the title suggests rules are meant to be broken, especially ones I made for myself.  And on this piece I did in fact break my one rule.... with the goal to have a much better looking piece at the end.

The first part of the coloring process is to block in all of the major shapes with a flat color and "lock the layer" so I can paint and change colors without worrying about staying within the lines (I know its a bit of "digital trickery" not available for traditional work but...HEY, LOOK OVER THERE!).  Anyhow, the process of blocking in all the shapes was quite time consuming with all of the various strands/wisps of hair.  The block in alone took several hours.

you can see here what the flat color looks like

After locking in the shape I began coloring and got to this stage here

I was just about done when I had the realization that I just did not like what I had here.  The colors felt too busy and I was not getting the nice shapes that I wanted.

This is where I decided instead of re doing what I had done up to this point and most likely get a similar result, for the sake of making a better image I was going to break my rule of using straight normal layers and zero "digital trickery"

tomorrow I will show what it looks like when you break your own rules.