colorz, dad!

So, I got a lot further into the whole painting process this week. In total, I've pretty much laid down the underpaintings/general blocks of color for 6 or 7 of the spreads and got finally LEGIT character development sheets set up.

And now for a special message directed at color: you're killing me, brah!

I've been keeping that James Jean painting in mind and been thinking of how I decided to give some sort of rust-ish cast on the open sun areas and a ghostlier green cast on the stuff under trees, but it seems impossible to get all of it to fit together. To try and get a hold on different ideas of palettes that are interesting to me, I've been looking at as many paintings as I can.



This is a piece by Claude Monet, a piece of a series of paintings of the same Rouen Cathedral with tons of different approaches to depicting light. Googling "Monet Cathedral" will give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Nothing was different about these paintings except for his palette and the light. I think there's something really untouchable here that could fit in with what I want to try and make. In a similar vain (albeit in a more contemporary style), Sam Weber has hit on some of these ideas in his illustrated version of Lord of the Flies.



Now, in the day, this is all well and good, but the question is if this low contrast, fogged over style of rendering looks cohesive with the night scene that really needs to be high contrast to be effective? I guess I'll figure out soon enough.

Character sketches are coming soon (as soon as the snow stops falling long enough for me to get to school to bring them back home, sheesh y'all.)