Coloring Book Page – Dagon

I've been working on this page from the Call of Cthulhu coloring book for what feels like forever. Somehow I just couldn't get it to where I was happy with it.

Part of the problem was my color choices, which I admit are a bit odd. But I’m also bugged by the line of sight between the human and the monster. They appear to be looking right at each other (rather than the human looking over his shoulder at a tower-dwarfing creature in the background), and that throws the scale way off.

Adding some grain to the image made it look a little better. But mostly I’m just glad to finally stop tinkering with it and move on to something else.

Coloring book page: Well monster

It’s been awhile since I finished a coloring book page, thanks in no small part to the problems I had with this one. It started out well, but then I got lost in the details. All the little twigs in the background proved especially exasperating, frankly a mistake on the part of the artist from the Call of Cthulhu Coloring Book.

I ended up making some significant alterations from the original, including removing a building from the background. Though I’m still not satisfied with the result, I’m more than ready to move on to something else.

Coloring book page – Swamp monster

 

I resisted the temptation to do this entirely in greens, instead opting for a triadic complement color scheme. The result reminds me of the black light posters in the back of Spencers Gifts back in the late 70s.

Coloring Book Page – Blob

 

It’s been awhile since I finished a coloring book page. That’s due in part to other commitments (including other art projects) and in part to getting stuck on a complicated image from the Call of Cthulhu coloring book.

This one, of course, is an entry from the Bernie Wrightson set. It was fun, especially working with the shades of green for the decomposing arm inside the monster. It was also more relaxing and less time-consuming than the CoC page, which I’m going to try to go back to next.

Coloring Book Page – Alien

Berni Wrightson strikes again. I had the worst time trying to pick a color for the clouds in the background, because I wanted something that would look sufficiently strange to make it clear that this was an alien world, but not so bizarre that it was hard to tell what they were intended to be.

Background color choice aside, this was a fun one to work on.

Coloring Book Page – Farm Fire

 

Another page from the Call of Cthulhu Coloring Book. I thought it would be more Lovecraftian if the fire was green.

This is the first time I’ve ever edited the source art. I opted to remove some clouds that were interfering with the night sky look. And there was a stray line in the smoke that made part of the clouds look like a thumb.

Coloring Book Page – Jen Stark 3

 Another Jen Stark design. This time I stuck with a single hue, decreasing brightness within the shapes and saturation from top to bottom. The result creates an interesting illusion of depth.

Coloring Book Page – Jen Stark 2

 

This is my first use of Fresco’s new reference layer feature. It sets up the line art as a reference for the fill tool. Unlike using the “multiply” option, this works directly with fills, eliminating the annoying little blank spots at the edges of lines.

This color scheme worked with the same hues as the previous Jen Stark, only this time it decreased saturation rather than brightness. And by using the fill tool rather than the pen tool, I finished it in minutes rather than days.

Coloring Book Page – Werewolves

 

Though I’ve been having great fun with the Berni Wrightson coloring book, the zombie and the mummy seemed somewhat unseasonal. These snowy lycanthropes are more in keeping with the holiday spirit.

Coloring Book Page – Mummy

Back to the Berni Wrightson coloring book. It was something of a relief to work with a limited color palette after the complicated color study. I finished this one in comparatively short order.

Coloring Book Page – Jen Stark 1

 

This one took awhile. It started as a page from the Jen Stark coloring book and kinda took on a life of its own.

The main idea here was to produce a color study that blends adjacent hues on the color wheel, decreasing in brightness from 100% in the middle to 45% on the edges. Though the result is more math than freestyle art, I liked how it turned out.

The reason it took awhile was that I opted to color it using a blake pen tool in Fresco. The coverage is uneven, which gives it a hand drawn appearance up close.

Coloring Book Page – Zombie

Back in the 70s Berni Wrightson created a coloring book that has been out of print since then. The artist’s Facebook page has been posting pictures from it, and I kicked in to the Kickstarter so I could color the pictures without feeling like I was stealing them.

This is my first effort. I started with the same green I used for the corpses in the Vlad the Impaler Christmas picture, and just went from there.

Coloring Book Page – Mucha

Starting with a line drawing from Pinterest inspired by Alphonse Mucha, I added color by using a stock photo of a piece of cloth from Rawpixel. The original was red, but I duplicated it into different layers and made hue, saturation and brightness adjustments to get the other colors. It took a combination of mobile and desktop Photoshop, but I was pleased with the results.

Coloring Book Page – Godzilla

I downloaded this drawing by Nathan Pride from Everfreecoloring. It proved to be low resolution and not highly detailed, so coloring it was the work of an afternoon even with the light effect layers.

Coloring Book Page – Art Deco Metallic

For this one I decided to mask rather than color between the lines.

Starting with art from Everfreecoloring, I backed it with matching gold and silver metallic layers from Rawpixel. Then I masked off parts of the gold layer to show the silver underneath. The final step was to add tones by coloring in with black at varying levels of opacity.

Overall I’m pleased with the effect, though I think it works better in the darker areas than it does in the highlighted stripe toward the right.

Coloring Book Page – Old One

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials. I was endlessly fascinated by Wayne Douglas Barlowe’s paintings of alien species from science fiction novels, novellas and short stories.

Though I know most of them only through their pictures, I’ve read some of the source stories. Obviously that includes the Old Ones from H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. In tribute to my childhood fave – now grown somewhat loose-paged through age and use – I used Barlowe’s illustration as a color reference for this page from the Call of Cthulhu Coloring Book.

Coloring Book Page – Cultist

This one combines watercolor layers with standard coloring layers. I’m getting better working with watercolors, so overall I’m pleased with the results.

Coloring Book Page – Hunting Horror

I had a lot of fun with this one. The monster here is a Hunting Horror, a creature that dissolves when hit with bright light.

The colors on the car are based on a photo of a Rolls Royce Phantom 1, but the rest of the colors in the picture are original. In addition to the coloring, I added the stars in the sky using a couple of spatter brushes, and I drew some green lines to supplement the black lines in the headlight beam.

With two gradient fills and some masking, I moved back and forth a bit between Fresco and Photoshop (the mobile version). This involved an annoying lag between saving the file in one app and being able to open the updated version in the other. Otherwise the combo worked reasonably well.

This was the first time I went back at the end and added a black layer behind the drawing. The extra step patched some of the inevitable gaps between the colors, improving the overall look.

Coloring Book Page – Cthulhu

 

I’d been looking forward to working on this page from the Call of Cthulhu coloring book for two reasons.

First, one of my upcoming NaNoWriMo projects revolves around this small statue of Cthulhu from H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu.” So spending some time looking at it helped me start to get into the writing mindset.

Second, it gave me the chance to experiment around with some of Fresco’s tool set. This started as two copies of the same line drawing. The coloring on the left is traditional, comic book style stuff. The one on the right was my first foray into Fresco’s watercolor simulation abilities. Clearly I still have a lot to learn about how it works, but at least I started experimenting.

Coloring Book Page – Flying Pig

This is my first page from The Public Domain Review’s coloring book. As the original isn’t copyrighted, I can share the “before” as well:

 The world map is also a public domain image. I also created color palettes from photos of a grassy field, gold bars, a village in Italy and a pig. Actually I used two pig photos, because the first one was too pink and I decided I wanted more of a furry, speckled pig look.

Fresco doesn’t do gradient fills at all, and its masking features aren’t super strong either. So I moved to the Photoshop mobile app to work on the sky and clouds.