house by the sea

[Ive]

I did this piece a month or so ago, a soft watercolors wash and the rest are pencils. I'm quite satisfied how it turned out, compared to the rest of my work but I have some questions about watercolors and mixing colors. All the colors I make tend to be to bright, I cant make shadows, when I mix the color with black then It's too dark(black that is Am I just not careful enough or is there some other secret tech



anyway, C&C are most welcome!

[DSillustration]

...I cant make shadows, when I mix the color with black then It's too dark(black that is Am I just not careful enough or is there some other secret tech

yeah,
not all shadows are black.
in this particular piece, i would guess the shadows would be mostly blue.

check out fred flikstone's color tutorials:
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=9504

[Ive]

thanks a lot ds. I'll study that tutorial, looks great...

[ohGr]

Reminds me of the Smurfs!

Pretty decent composition. What irks me is the saturation of that green; way too bright and not enough variations. It looks rather flat and dull to me. A few more of those pretty yellow flowers you have on the left there in the center might make a nice touch.

Also, is this supposed to be a vignette? On the lower left and right I see the two corners going off into white which lead me to ask. If it's supposed to be a vignette, I'd throw it into Photoshop and make it look like one with some gradients. If not, I'd still throw it into Photoshop but then use the crop tool to get those corners off there.

Rather nice though, just needs a few tweaks I think.

[inspector Lee]

I think you're doing pretty well here. Since water colors tend to lose some of their saturation as they dry, I think it's better to be a bit too saturated rather than not saturated enough. (it's certainly easier to fix). You can just re-work an area by adding a wash of more muted color over it, to take some of the saturation down.

[DSillustration]

[Ive]

ohGr, the truth is that this was one of my first 'serious' paintings on the classic medium so I layed the green color oversaturated...also I was lazy about the corners, I'll fix that!
mr. Lee, I did the colored pencils over the watercolors so I enhanced the saturation, I don't think that's the problem^^
DS, you're confusing me with that painitng . Shouldn't the shadows on those trees be in a varation of deep green-blue-black? rather than pure black hmmm....the houses and the trees are painted like there's strong light coming from the right with deep black shadows, yet the plain blue sky's above them o.O the mysteries of art I suppose^^
thanks everyone!