Painting "Hi, Mr Whale!"

 This post is a continuation of the previous post, "Hi, Mr Whale!" In this post I will share my thought process while painting this image.

Final painting

I was infatuated with realism when I started the painting process. Even though I started with color thumbnails—a regular practice—I felt overwhelmed with color picking. I wanted to emphasize the witch with warm color; logically the water should be painted with cool colors.

Color thumbnails

I remembered feeling stuck at this point. I did not know how to proceed. One of the many reasons was water. I knew water had 3 components: reflection, refraction, and haze color. But how do I start? I decided to do something different and painted values.

Value painting

At this point, I was mentally prepared for a difficult painting. I was happy with any progress at all. A small step was overlaying the color thumbnail above the painted values and started painting colors to define shapes.

Painting color over value painting

My guiding principle after this was keeping contrast low for the underwater elements and giving high contrast to the witch and the cat.

Read left to right, top to bottom

Tricks I used:

• painting caustic on the sea floor;
• adding darker values around the image to frame the image;
• reducing the opacity of lineart for underwater elements.

I had a bit of surprise at this point. When I tested the overall brightness by applying Exposure adjustment, I found out that I had been painting 1 step too dark.

The effect of increasing exposure by 1 unit

I felt that I overlooked something significant. The image on the left looks like an overcast day, while the image on the right a sunny day.

At this point, I simply put in the time and energy to polish the painting as far as I could. On hindsight, the final painting still lacks a frame.

Final painting