Silas Zee: Kaori Again

Kaori Again

2016.07.07

Here's a Kaori piece that's been absorbing my free time over the last week or so. Kaori's hair is like Pocahontas's hair, it's almost its own character. So I wanted to do a portrait that I could go kinda nuts with the hair. After figuring out the pencils I inked every part in it a seperate layer (which is probably something everyone already does ^_^;). It made coloring a lot harder but I think it helps everything pop a little more. When inking her hair I tried not to keep it too clean, so you'l notice a lot of fuzzy and sketchy lines. I wanted to keep the messy look.

The first pic is pretty much how I wanted to colors to turn out, but I ended up doing eight passes at the colors. Usually when I try my hand at a blended coloring style I get scared and only use part of each layer's opacity. But this time I after working on the colors for a couple of hours I cranked most of the shade and highlight layers to full opacity to see what it looked like and whaddya know? I did something kinda right without even knowing it. XD

As for the other one, after doing a cel-shaded pass I thought I'd give a night piece a shot since I don't color those much. I cheated a bit with the colors where I just took the flats and kicked the sliders all the way to cyan. :O But hey, it worked. Obviously it was a lot simpler than the blended piece, I just threw in some extra gradients for the shadows and highlights and I was done. Okay, maybe not THAT much simpler... XD

I also went back and did some simple cel-shaded colors to better show off the line art. I'm glad I did because those ended up being some of my favorites. ^___^

The four up top are the finished versions that turned out the best I think, but you'll see my other tries below. They're all a bit different, different levels of layer opacity and bringing the pencils back in to help with shading and such. I'm really happy with how these turned out but I'll probably hate them in a few days. XDDD