Recently Merge Dragons and I reached the point where our common journey came to an end. Which sounds like an HR guy dumping his girlfriend. I reached a plateau in the game and realized that I didn’t want to keep playing anymore.
In pursuit of something else to occupy the downtime in my daily routine, I browsed the app store looking for a new game. Finding nothing that wasn’t obviously unsuitable for one reason or another, I opted to seek elsewhere.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I downloaded some coloring books thinking that they’d be a great help in coping with isolation and stress. Somehow the practice never took hold. I finished part of the Deep One picture from the Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu coloring book, but then I set it down and didn’t pick it back up again.
Until now. I’ve used Adobe Fresco for several projects and have gotten used to how it simulates actual artists’ materials such as watercolors and oils. So I thought I’d try it on a coloring book project. Discarding my previous project, I began the Deep One anew.
One of the first things I learned was that setting the line drawing layer’s blend mode to “multiply” made everything but the black lines disappear. Previously I tried color selecting and masking, which kinda worked but left a lot of white halos around the lines. Using the new blend mode made it look and feel like a coloring book.
I used Adobe Capture to create a five-color palette from a photo of an iguana. The rest was straightforward, soothing, and more emotionally satisfying than Merge Dragons.
