TET Art: Three Wise Color Monkeys - Part 5

Stage 4: Refining Colors and Adding Form.

Despite missing a couple of weeks writing about my Three Wise Color Monkeys painting project work has been continuing.

Last post I'd just started on Stage 4, refining the colors and adding form through shading and adding highlights.

This work has been continuing and, due to the break I took on writing about the project, this post you get a nice comparison of how far the work has progressed.

In the first image (above), I began by adding darker shadows to the blue monkey, using dark blue. Instead of mixing dark red, and dark green, for shadow on the two other monkeys, I continued to use dark blue on them as well.

This wasn't particularly part of the plan. I had thought I was going to mix dark red and dark green but then I thought, shadows tend to have a blueish/purple look anyway, so why not just keep using the blue? As it turned out, this worked quite well. You can see on the red and green monkeys, the red and green underneath the blue I painted has altered it enough to read as kind of a dark red and dark green.

Watch the video below for more detail and a speed paint of this stage then continue reading after the video.

Continuing to refine my shading.

Since the above video was made I have continued to refine the shading on the monkeys and their tree. Specifically working a lot more on the tree and the yellow of the monkey's shorts and faces. Work has progressed quite noticeably - as can be seen in my second image.

By this point you can see how very different my traditionally painted art looks to my digital art. If I were to have created a similar image, digitally, there would be a lot more areas of flat color, and the shading would be much smoother and more even. That's the reason why I think I need to keep my traditional art skills current.

Digital art software may be able to emulate traditional media but it doesn't emulate how I use traditional media. My digital art always looks very different to my traditional work, even when I try to make my digital art look the same.

Watch the video below for more detail on this stage, as well as the usual speed paint of the process.



I feel the painting is very close to finished at this point. Maybe one or two more sessions and it should be done. I realize, last post, I said the painting should be pretty much done by now, but I didn't anticipate how long this stage would actually take with any degree of accuracy. There was I time when I could paint something like this in the space of two afternoons. That's how rusty I am.