Five O - Flats

Happy Saturday, everyone!

Must admit that this week has been busy and hasn't afforded me as much free time to paint as I'd hoped. Plus, I think I may have screwed myself a little by sketching up a scene more complicated than I'd expected it to be when I first had the idea...

Anyways, here's my Flats process broken into stages. If you've been following along over the months you'll know that the way I work is to build a sketch up in layers for the various elements (background, nurses, patients, tubes, in this case) and then do a second 'Flats' stage.

The Flats stage sees me then creating numerous layers under the sketch and filling in areas of similar material/colour. This, I often use various shades of grey to accomplish this, but sometimes, like this time, I'll throw any colour from my palette into things and figure out what colours might look like later. Hence the pastel coloured hellscape that is image #1 in this example.

I then 'lock' all the transparencies on these flat layers, which means that I can paint quickly within a layer and never worry about going 'outside the lines'. It's the process that works best for me, as in previous years, while learning how to digitally paint, I found I spent more probably more time erasing and cleaning up edges during the painting phase than actually painting the body of the painting.

Image #2 is the first part of the fun - flooding the layers with their base colours and seeing what works. Coming into this, I assumed that it would be obvious that the patient characters would be clad in black latex, but after experimenting with greens and whites on the nurses, I decided to throw in red catsuits to see what things might look like - I was pleasantly surprised at how this strong contrast brought much more life to the scene.

Image #3 is a screenshot of my view in Clip Studio - you'll see on the right of the screen a small part of the list of many layers I've yet to paint. And I've learned from many hours of experience that taking the time to name them now saves me lots of headaches later.

With lines locked, flats filled in and all the layers ready that sets me up to start painting knowing that the only things I now have to worry about is applying paint and remembering where my imaginary lights are coming from in the scene.

So that's me set for the day - time to grab a fresh cup of coffee and start on that background...

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend