#pastel tutorial

Lets paint a dog with pastels! 

My new video is up! This time I am using pastels to paint a doggo :D

Enjoy!

MusicI’m glad you think so ;w; Thank you so muchh! <3

I’m not really good at explaining stuff but I hope this one is helpful enough ;w;

On colors:

1. I usually think of popular hue combinations first. Purple+blue, pink+blue, yellow+orange+red, and the like. (The ones that usually sit next to each other, really)2. After establishing an abstract idea for a hue combination, most of the time I pick the colors in the picker at really high values, and nowhere near the highly saturated portion.

3. Then I fill the whole canvas with a solid color in order for me to determine what would look good after fucking around.

!: What you need to avoid is this

Avoid combining colors that blends too much. ^!: If the colors I apply don’t look good, I adjust them using color editors and stuff until they look good

On creating stuff + Colors again:

1. I usually let the colors guide me on this one. The muted blue contrasting against the pink background just makes me think about clouds, so unconventional yet generic clouds it is.

As I paint, I add more colors that looks fitting close to other colors.

accidents happen and now we get yellow accents here and there

I became a lil bit overboard so I merged all layers and adjusted levels and curves, and now we got a washed out view of our lil sky.

If it looks a lil bit too empty, I add some more generic stuff and something you don’t get to see everyday

Fishes flying through the sky!

Don’t worry, you’re not bothering me! But to answer your question, well!…

I made a simple tutorial about it here, but I have different styles of pastel and that style is more of a de-saturated type, whilst my newer klance icons have more of a ‘light and soft’ effect.

This style requires a bit more patience.

I go straight to the ‘Selective Color’ adjustment layer. I make a bunch of these. But let’s start with the first layer.

First thing I do? Reds at -100%, so Keith’s paladin armor has a soft red tone to it. For this you have to be careful, because at first the skin will be lighter. Do not worry, this will be fixed.

Next is Blue’s at -100%, to lighten the blues of Lance’s armor. I also put Cyan at -75% so you can still see the glow, but it’s not as prominent as other colors.

NOW, you fix the skin color. Change your yellows to 100% black. Still too light? Make a new adjustment layer and make your yellows to 100% black again. If it’s still too light, duplicate that new layer until the skin is dark enough!

And lastly, I set the gamma correction to around 1.10-1.30ish. 1.20 was a good match for the lighting of this scene, so I choose that.

So now you can see the difference:

Original

Pastel

If you guys want, I can post the PSD, but you still may have to adjust layers accordingly depending on the lighting/skin tone.

P.S.

For Allura, I had to duplicate her image layers and set them to ‘multiply’ since her skin tone has more magentas than yellows. You can also use that to darken the tones!

Just how I do pastels (I have no idea what I'm doing btw)

1- Pan pastels. You can also use eyeshadow. You don't need loads of colour it's just to plan things out with your fingers before you start.

2- A black pastel and a white pastel. These are very important for blending. White makes things lighter dark makes things darker duh.

3- Scalpel. You need these to get a nice sharp point on pastel pencils. You can also use it to shave pastel sticks or scrape the paper.

4- sponge, tortillon and q tip. They all do the same thing. Blending but fine point where you can't use your finger or want a certain shaped stroke (same concept as a paintbrush)

5- some kind of large sturdy thing with an edge. I use a wooden knife I got from a takeaway. It's for scraping things off the page where you don't want to use the scalpel because you want it to be more gentle. Good for fixing mistakes.

6- pastel sticks vs pencils. The pencils are better for smaller detail work. The sticks are more fun flowy and messy.