writes:Now, we warp ahead a bit. I painted the odds and ends on her back in a variety of colors – I used reds and greens.
Why reds and greens? Well, the red works nicely with my brown because the brown is a warm brown (a reddish-brown); they just look right together. Green is the complementary color for red, so they will always look good together. You can see some yellow and orange in there as well – yellow and orange work because they are close to red on the color wheel, colors that are close together have harmony – they work.
Enough theory! The main thing I want to point out here is that I've put down the basecoat for her hair – you may notice that it looks blue! What the heck, Minidragon - we need black hair!!
Easy now! Have you ever noticed that in the old (and new) Superman comics, Superman's hair has blue highlights? That's what we are going for here... we want to have highlights that don't make his hair look really gray, so we'll throw some blue in there.
I've mixed some blue and black paint (a primary blue – like the blue you'd see on a color wheel with just three colors – red, blue, and yellow). The mix was about 3:1, black, blue.
I added some light blue to my mix and painted on some highlights. I've concentrated on picking out individual strands of hair, highlighting wherever I thought that
- it looked good, and
- where the light might hit
Next, I added still more light blue (we're at about 1:1 light blue:original blue/black mix now). I painted this lighter color onto the same spots I highlighted in the last step, but I've allowed the darker colors to keep showing.
In photo 12, I've highlighted with pure white – healthy (clean!) black hair has very stark white highlights (check out some hair dye boxes or a Goth chick some time). I kept the white areas pretty small but numerous - I really want Lyria's hair to look shiny and glossy.
To finish up the hair, I gave a light wash of blue and black ink (1:1:1:6 blue ink, black ink, Future, water). This ties all the colors together, deepens things up, and knocks the very stark white highlights down a bit. C'est finis! Her hair is done! In my eyes, the blue livens things up, and provides some depth without making her hair look all dry and gray.
