Welcome back to my ongoing tutorial about the cover of The Dreamer issue #4.

In part one, I discussed the importance of the color comp in the formation of a painting.  I pointed out three important aspects of the comp stage:  The comp stage decides the overall emotional impact of the final piece.  The comp stage helps you to spot problems and challenges that you will face while you paint the final image.  The comp stage is the perfect stage at which to make any significant drawing or compositional changes.

Today, I will take the first two aspects and elaborate on them.

First, the emotional impact:

While it is important not to rush through the comp stage, to take your time making the right color choices, you also don’t want to spend too much time on the comp, by way of putting in too many tiny details that are just going to get painted over.  In the final piece, I don’t believe that there is even one pixel from the comp showing through.

Because I reduced the file size by drastically reducing the resolution (for this comp stage only), I was able to move fast and make changes very quickly with very large brushes.

(As a side note, for most of this comp, I used a custom brush that I was given by an art director of mine.  I customized that brush again with the brush editor, trying to get the brush so simulate an oil look.  I generally use the tool presets palette to manage all of my brushes and I only use the brush palette to customize brushes.  You can learn more about customizing brushes in Photoshop in lots of different places on the internet, but I will recommend that you check out Paul Lasaine’s blog for some really good stuff.)

I wanted there to be a pink wash over everything, even the shadows, to give the piece that warm, romantic glow.  I am a lover of diffused light, which is basically a soft glow as opposed to a strong directional, harsh light source.  Since the piece takes place at morning and there would also be a lot of cannon smoke in the air, the diffused light was easy to justify. 

The diffused light obviously contributes to the romantic feeling of the piece.  You can see in the comp a purple rim light around the shadowed side of the figures which I later painted out.  It felt too contradictory to have a strong reflected light on the shadow side of the figures and a soft glow on the key light side of the figures, so I ditched the strong reflection and went for a softer pink fill light in the shadows.

I used almost no cool colors in the entire piece.  The dark blue in the flag and the blue of Bea’s dress are the only places where I put distinctly cool colors.  And this is only because I absolutely had to use blue in both of those areas - for historical accuracy and for story continuity. 

Had I just used a ‘straight out of the tube’ blue for either of those colors, it would have been an eyesore.  The blues would have been very harsh and distracting, so I blocked in the blues with just enough variation between light and dark to imply the forms and then I began putting a series of pink washes over the blue areas.  I continued doing this, adding and subtracting washes of pink, layer upon layer, until they ended up harmonizing with the whole piece but were still perceived as being the correct color of blue.

The grass and plants, though they appear green in the piece, are not really green at all.  Go on, use the color picker in Photoshop and see how they come out.  The greens are just neutralized reds and pinks that appear green when placed next to the pinks in the smoke or the bark of the trees.  This relates to what I said about the blues in the sense that you have to consider both color and light separately when trying to achieve a strong emotional impact. 

This is where artistic license comes in.  I was able to push the color of the grass farther away from its natural color than I could the blues of the dress and the flag.  This is because our historian-eyes demand that the blue of the flag be recognizable and our audience-eyes demand that the blue of Bea’s dress be recognizable.  We all know what Bea’s dress is supposed to look like, so I had to be more careful as a painter when ‘messing’ with that color.  The pink grass, in other words, is more forgivable. 

Sure, I wanted a pink hue to everything, but I had to be selective and add more pink to certain areas and less pink to others.  Finding this balance is difficult, but lots of fun and extremely rewarding when it works.  Be patient and take your time.  Try lots of different things.  Experiment.  We all get better at this the more we do it.  Getting it wrong many times before you get it right is often more beneficial than getting it right on the first try.

I put a color gradient in the smoke.  Originally, I had the entire smoke cloud looking like it now does at the top of the frame of reference.  It was all very bright and pink.  But this made it look flat and kind of boring, even though it was bright.  I neutralized the color of the smoke near the bottom of the cloud and blended the two extremes in the middle.  This helped to create the illusion of a sunrise and an environment that extends beyond the foreground seen in the piece. 

The more neutral areas near the bottom of the smoke cloud imply a cast shadow from a hill in front of the characters but behind the viewer.  It also works to complement the composition, but I will get into that in next week’s post. I’ll also talk about the color choices for the sky and cannon in next week’s post.

By the time I was finished with the comp, I realized that the emotional impact was only 90% there.  I was on the right track, but I knew that I could push it farther and make it even more intense.  I could have spent more time in the comp stage, but I was pretty confident that I knew exactly what had to happen in order to maximize the emotional impact. 

I don’t recommend leaving the comp stage until you have a plan for all of your problems (at least the ones that you become aware of at this point) and your emotional impact is 100% established, but I took a calculated risk in moving on and it worked out.  I knew that I needed to saturate the color in the areas where the main key light was shining and that I needed to add some darker shadows in the foreground and middleground.  I was pretty certain that those two minor changes would really heighten the drama.

Before I wrap up for the afternoon, I will explain some of the problems and challenges that I foresaw when working on the drawing and comp stages:

The top of the larger tree was awkwardly intersecting the smoke cloud.  This disrupted the nice, triangular composition of the whole piece.  It drew attention to itself unnecessarily and drew attention away from the main characters.

The second tangent was at a strange point where the back of the cannon and Alan’s shoulder met.  This tangent created a contradiction in depth and it made the cannon appear to be in both the middleground AND the background simultaneously.

I knew that both of those tangent issues would have to be resolved.

I have already explained how I dealt with the problem of the blues in the flag and Bea’s dress with the series of pink washes.  Granted, I would continue to tweak the hues of the blue areas, trying to perfect them and really get them set in the environment, but the problem was more or less resolved upon completion of the comp.

Alan’s left arm was also giving me trouble.  Because his arm is perpendicular to the direction of the key light, it could have ended up seeming very flat.  It could also have appeared to be floating above Bea’s back.  This challenge was a mystery.  I had no clue how I was going to solve that.

Lastly, the shape of the smoke was going to be tricky, since there would be a delicate balance between making it feel really organic and random and yet designed and deliberate.

That about covers the problems that I was in touch with at this point in the process.  I later ran into a few more minor issues with the environment among other things, but I will cover those when I reach that point in the tutorial.

Next week I will talk about using light, color and detail to complement a composition.  I will also discuss the changes in the composition that were necessary upon reaching the comp stage.  Perhaps I will also get to talk about another essential ingredient in the formation of a good painting: REFERENCE!

:: continued in part 3 ::