Here's my Colour Collective piece for the prompt 'Venetian Red'. I've been trying to practice more backgrounds (You'd be amazed how much work I do that requires no background at all, so whenever I get hit with one it's a bit of a shock!) ... I got a bit carried away. I wanted to use the red in a less obvious way, especially as I have a habit of including red in illustrations anyway, but I still thought it would be fun to draw some of the red buildings in Venice.
I was trying to focus more on atmosphere and energy than strict perspective accuracy. And old cities are pretty wonky anyway, which I took as a good sign. Perspective and I have never been friends, and I swear our relationship got much worse after the perspective drawing unit at university.... It's definitely something I'm working on, however.
Here's an animated gif showing my process. As you can see, to start with there was more than one man on the bridge, but I jettisoned the second man, who was really surplus to requirements, and definitely surplus to my time constraints. Sorry, second man.
I used a lot of adjustment layers to reduce the saturation/add blue tones/increase the contrast of the edges of the scene, to really make the red the focus. I didn't want to lose the thief however, so I kept some warm tones on her and used the composition to lead the eye towards her as much as possible.
Overall, I like this piece. There are a lot of things that could be better, but it's certainly got good atmosphere and a good story behind it, and I think I might possibly clean it up further for use in my portfolio. What do you think? Anything that really needs work?
This took me somewhere in the 6-9 hour range in Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2.
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