WiP: “System Failure”

Just one WiP entry this time… i’m still experimenting a bit with how i’m going to post my WiPs.

Basic greyscale flats. I’ve gotten in the habit of laying down flats first, and being very careful to make them even, so i can use a combination of Wand, New Layer via Copy, and Lock Transparency to pull out and edit sections of the piece. In hindsight, these should always be done in colour. I can desaturate what i’m working on, but grey flats don’t work very well with my workflow.

Added lighting, detail, and texture. Maybe a bit too much texture.

Adding colour in a separate layer over the original

By this point i was really sick of the brushstroke style i’d started off with. Sometimes it looks good, sometimes it doesn’t. Fortunately, because of the way i’d coloured this image, i only needed to mess around with one relatively simple layer to get things looking right. I applied the Cutout filter to my greyscale layer to start myself in the right direction, then repainted over everything which still needed to be fixed (which was about 80% of the picture – Cutout makes stuff awfully angular – but 80% is still better than 100% in this case.)

Finished off by putting more flames on a Screen layer, which makes ’em look extra-bright.