Alora
Added 2025-04-05 14:08:25 +0000 UTCCutie at the beach.~ It's Dragonfist's OC Alora. :>
Ambitious variant in this one! For a while now I've been experimenting with this new way to do cast shadow variants; The simple way to do stuff like this is you simply shade the character as if there wasn't that big shadow there, and then you apply it on top with some sort of layer filter, typically a multiply layer. However, while it's often serviceable, the result is not the best. It makes colors look a little funky, and you get these odd artifacts where you see shadows stacked on top of shadows. So I've been slowly tinkering with ideas for how to do it better, and this is the first piece where it covers a major area. And I think it turned out pretty good! It didn't take that long, and I'm pretty happy with the result.
I often have this issue when I'm working on a summer scene where I want things to look sunny, but they don't feel sunny. I make the sand bright, and I do the shadows, and technically all the things are there, but it still feels weirdly overcast. It usually comes down to finicky color tuning. This time I thought to play with the contrast filters and see how they behaved, and I think I may have gleamed some useful insight. Gonna be experimenting further. π
Enjoy. β€
