@artwatch colouring contest - the start is finally made!

I entered @artwatch's colouring contest a couple of days ago and was finally able to make a start after finishing editing my latest process video.

Being the gung ho nutter than I am, I decided to have a crack at the whole bloody thing instead of picking one page to work on like a sensible person.

So the first thing I did was grab all of the pages and collate them in Krita (I could have also just grabbed the image in its entirety but I didn't see that at the time and it's not like this took too long).

That's kinda big, might make a nice bookmark when I'm done. Now there's some beautiful lineart there so my usual colouring style (the end result doesn't have lines) isn't going to work. So sketch colouring it is, and seeing as I'm being gung ho I'll use the pretty watercolour (bristles_wet) brush that needs to be on the same layer.

The lineart comes as a jpg so had to get rid of the background first (Filter -> Colours -> Colour to Alpha and pick white on each layer).

Fastest background removal ever! Wish I'd known about/had that a million years ago when I still used lines.

The bristles_wet brush is sinfully slow on large canvases (this one is 1440x7680) so used the fill circle brush to block out three segments of blue and stuck the sky on its own layer, then used the watercolour brush to ease the transitions.

Yes I could have used the gradient tool but I didn't want to.

That's it, all done!

Pfft yeh right. I shade slightly differently with this brush than I do with the other brushes. Firstly there's the light touch so the blue in the background shows through (which should theoretically eliminate or at least reduce the need for the overlay layers I usually use for ambient light which is incidentally why I need to use this brush on the same layer as unlike the mix brush which is my other favourite for sketch colouring it doesn't blend down as well if it's not), and secondly I do some lighting with the colours (more pressure/colour in shadow and less in light). It works out when I then get around to painting the light and shadow. Well it makes sense to me anyway!

Probably going to lose most of whatever detail I put in in the final but I can't help myself.

Made this one part tutorial because I know at least one of my TeamAus crew is learning Krita :)

There will be a couple more wip posts (because I got asked nicely) probably over the next couple of days. In the meantime if you want to have a crack at colouring this or parts thereof grab it and enter the comp while you're about it, looks like some nice prizes up for grabs :)

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• @artwatch's colouring contest

Thanks for looking! ^_^

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