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The next stage, the “color-comp” is pivotal.  The older I get, the more I mature as a painter, the more time I spend on this step. 


Basically, the color comp is a loosely-painted, smaller version of your final painting.

  1. •This is where the overall emotional impact of the piece is decided. 

  2. •This is where you discover what problems and challenges you are going to encounter along the way and begin preparing for them, although some problems and challenges may be evident in the drawing stage.  (Alan’s left arm, the position of the cannon, the tops of the trees, the shape of the smoke, Bea’s blue dress...)

  3. •This is where you have freedom to re-draw certain things or move things around to change the composition since color and detail have a significant effect on whether or not a composition that worked in the drawing stage continues to work in the comp stage.  (Note the way the smoke changes from the sketch to both of the stages of the comp.)


I knew that Lora wanted the time of day to feel like dawn, but she was also urging me, over and over, to “make it girly.”  I haven’t seen pink light at dawn very often, but pinks and reds and warm grays seemed like the right answer to get the emotional tone that we were going for. 


Lora scanned her drawing and sent it to me at full-resolution (3082x4044).  I reduced the file-size by about 75% so I could make fast strokes with huge brushes in Photoshop without my computer slowing down.  I would bring the file size back up to full resolution after the comp was approved.

I duplicated the layer with Lora’s drawing on it and then cleared the original layer.  I then had two layers, the empty background layer and the drawing on a layer above that. 


I changed the ‘adjustment layer’ setting on Lora’s drawing layer to ‘Multiply.’


Doing this allows the artist to paint on layers underneath the drawing without disrupting the drawing.  The overall image maintains the appearance that there is paint underneath and the line drawing on top. 



I covered the whole background layer with the mauve color that you can see in the image above.  Then I began to lay in large blocks of color, just loosely trying to arrive at some sort of balance and overall color harmony.


There was a lot of experimenting at this stage, but not as much as I usually encounter at the comp stage, seeing as how I knew that I wanted this very pink tone to the whole thing.  Any decisions that you can have made at the beginning like that make the whole project easier... ...as long as they are the right decisions.


You can’t know for certain, of course, that every decision you make early on is the right one which is why you have to keep everything in question until the appropriate time.  This probably sounds too vague right now, but I will try to make sense of it in future posts.


On Monday, I will discuss my specific color choices.  I’ll also elaborate on those ‘problems and challenges’ that I could foresee upon starting the comp.  I hope you guys enjoyed this and will continue hang around at ChrisOatley.com.


Thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing from you.  Feel free to email me or, even better, post comments about what you would like to see or questions you would like to have answered in future posts.  Feel free to let me know how I’m doing with the communication and whatnot.  Too much detail?  Too little?  I can go on and on...  Thanks again.


:: continued in part 2 ::