Hairy Eyeball Monsters

I had a great drawing day on Monday and ended up with several good eyeball monster drawings.

Yesterday I spent 10+ hours painting them. I envisioned bright colors and I got fun bright colors. I used an eclectic color palette. I used Hansa Yellow, Cadmium Red Medium, and Cobalt Teal. I love how these colors looked on my empty palette. So much potential.

I dug in and coaxed and prodded the colors. The biggest problem was producing greys to balance out the bright fun colors. Cobalt Teal is a bright color and didn’t dull the other colors as well as a Ultramarine Blue might have. I had to use more black to get darker values than I usually do.

As I painted I felt like I was playing Suduko. If I changed a color here, then I needed to change the color behind it so the values would work. When I painted a blue in the background, I had to change the creature’s color in the foreground so they would pop off the page. It look longer than the 2 hours I had set aside to work on color studies. In the future, I’ll need to plan on more time to get it right.

At one point I took a picture of my swatch page, then converted it into greyscale and wrote a greyscale value next to each color. It’s funny how a bright green shows up in a greyscale as a 4.

At the end of the day, I had made mistakes, fixed them, and even tried other different colors in additional comps. Here’s the best of what I came up with:

I’d love to hear what you think. Are these colors too bright or just right?