Research Sub R2 (vehicle design)

presentation sheet with orthographic and some original thumbnails

This was the original thumbnail sketch I took and blew up to start filling up spaces. I added railings for stability once the sub returned to the main ship for docking. I also added many, many lights and windows. 

I told myself that if I wanted to have a cleaner painting, I needed to create a good line drawing. I still hate making a super clean line drawing since it always look stiff afterwards but I kept the lines as clean as possible before going back and filling in a flat value for the silhouette. 

From there, the purple background wasn't dark enough for me to see any loose paint lines so I filled in with a nearly black. (It's actually a really desaturated dark blue.)

And from there, once I filled in a solid single value for silhouette purposes, I started actually painting in the value differences while keeping things very desaturated and monochromatic to avoid going too crazy on colors early. I found at times, I tend to pick too many colors at once and it gets crazy quick. 

Once the solid values were in place, I started painting in shadow and light. After that, I started using the  soft light  blending mode for the brush and adding in colors to see what looked nice together. I wanted to keep yellow as a primary so I tried various oranges and purples but the purple I had picked looked odd for a submarine color scheme. I threw on the purple and then started playing with the Color Balance layer adjustment to find a good mix I wanted. I went towards a warm magenta orange-yellow balance. Once that was in place, I painted in the highlights and eventually wear and dirt/rust. 

It was a nice change of pace to actually draw the cleaner line, rather than my usual loose sketch - paint over method. I also separated the layers more than I would usually, something I started implementing during the #mermay art challenge drawings. It definitely helped keep things within the silhouette and also allowed me to keep each blending mode on its own which let me keep things organized in a different but helpful way. Particularly the soft light layer painting could be kept away from the overlays and the color dodge and extra highlights could be on their own.