Rooting Through Color || Ellie

Nigh on a month ago, I cracked open The Last of Us Part II. It had sat on my shelf, still shrink-wrapped, since its release. The original game was special to me, and remains in my top five. Some stories stick to your ribs in not-entirely unpleasant ways. I know both installments in the story are divisive. Part II released too much in the slop and poison of my life, and I knew I wouldn't be able to handle it. I didn't want to resent the story for pulling me deeper into the dark places I felt so trapped in, so it waited. And it waited years. 

And I unsealed the plastic and I opened the case and I fumbled the disc into the drive when I was fragile, when I was, like a sponge, porous and open and needing to be filled with something to turn me sodden. 

I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. There's a lot of tangled reasons for that. But I'm trying to slowly untangle them through paintings. 

CSP still feels a new beast to me, but one I'm steadily more comfortable with. Its blending modes don't feel the same to me as procreate, but I'll learn them as I go.  Because this feels so foreign, finding color for these pieces was difficult. I knew I wanted to paint Ellie. Let's break down what's going on in this progression a bit: 

1 ▲ I had a firmer idea of where I wanted the colors to go for the adult ellie piece, so I tried to work from that. If Adult Ellie's painting was going to have a glaze of fern green beneath it, a cool blue felt right for a younger Ellie. But this initial slap of color felt too monotone, and Ellie's clothing pulled more like her adult self's Seattle Day 2 outfit. Though the blue would make the small peaks of fungus shelves more vibrant, it felt too washed out. 

2 ▲ Throwing things in the completely opposite direction, I laid down a rotten, mossy yellow color. Iconic red shirt. Muddy overshirt. It looked too vibrant. The Last of Us really pushes its blues and greens, but drags back its reds as it's a color that fades fast when given to the sunlight. But somewhere between these two weirdo versions, I had something.  

3 ▲ When in doubt, duplicate your layers and start playing with blending effects. There was a lot of duplicating layers here, some set to Color, some set to Luminance, I think a few times each one set to Multiply. Eventually, I was able to find something closer to what I wanted. I wanted Ellie's face to have a sort of luminance to be the area of highest contrast, that way it'd draw the eye. The shirt, too, staying some sort of red tone meant I could pull in more color. It's not perfect, but it's somewhere closer to the end. 

3.5 (not pictured) I posterized the whole image and overlaid it to separate out the colors just a little bit more and wind up with some odd couple combos.

4 ▲ At this stage, I needed a better idea of where my values would be. I made a new layer (I'm sorry I didn't get a screenshot!) and painted over the whole thing in black and white. This gives me a rough idea of where I want my shadows, what I want pushed back, and what I want drawn forward for focus. With this painting, I really want to play with focal depth, putting Ellie's face in sharper relief and letting the edges of her silhouette and the fungus hang back. When I finished the slapdash values, I set it a low opacity and hit the multiply blend mode. 

5 ▲ This is where I'm sitting now. I roughed out the shadows of her face just a little bit more on a separate layer. From here, I'll go in to properly refine and render. That's the long, long slog. By no means will these be the final colors, but they're the foundation of what I'm working on. 

Adult Ellie is way less complicated. Pretty much got that in one, and duplicated the layer to play with the brightness/contrast to get some real luminosity in her. 

I'm bouncing around a bunch of different things right now. Would you all want a wip dump? If you read this far, thank you. I hope you're all doing well. Let me know if there's anything you'd like to see from me this month! 

P.S. Those aren't the brushes I'm using on this. If you want those, let me know and I'll put together a post!