[Kagri]

Hello!
I'm new here and I'd really love it if you would help me with my drawing. This is my first try of colouring black and white picture, where shadows and light are completely worked thru. Normally I just create a contour-layer and then colour all the layers under it, but somewhere on this forum I read that for colouring you can use hue/saturation options, and this doesn't work, if you have only black contour in your layer. So I merged it with white, and tried to make it work. But there's just something wrong now: it looks so colour-less! And whatever I do (colour balance, hue/saturation options), it just doesn't help. It becomes either too-coloured, either everything is fine, but then the contrast is completely lost between shadow and light.
And another horrible thing is that this lady is a drow, I never drew them before so her skin seems so dead :S Maybe somebody has ideas on how I can make this picture look better?
Thanks a lot.

[Matthew]

Looks pretty cool this one, maybe the neck and some parts could be fixed but that depends on what you are lookin for in the changes, and what is a drow?
with the color, u can add a small dot with a more vibrant color to make the other colors pop out a bit more.
Her skin can reflect more of the light to our right, so maybe more yellow on her left cheek and those parts with more light.

looks good as it is though and I like it.
keep up
Matthew

[Kagri]

Woho!!! Thank you very much for your reply, I already thought it's so horrible that nobody wants to say a thing!
A drow is an elf with a very dark skin, almost black, and there the problems start - I can't make her look like actual brownish-black ppl, and the other opposite is blue, so she's getting a lil bit violet. My problem is: I can't really imagine how her skin should look like!

I already made three versions of her, and heh, I can't decide which one is better:








P.S. About the yellow light oh her cheek: I thought I'll make cold light in this picture, so I guess yellow won't really fit, cuz it's a warm colour, isn't it? And when I try to add something that's of a cold shade, she start looking way too undead. So hmm... I just can't decide where I should stop.

[Sorry]

I love the first one nice eerie vampire look..

[Kagri]

Heh? My husband also said so, but everybody else says she's not black, but way too violet.

[Matthew]

aha now I know what a drow is, thanks.

u can try out with making the nose a bit bigger (wider nostrils) and also make a selection around the face and try with lower down the brightness, then make the eyes a little bit more darker.
the purple thing, add more grey to the background cause it is the background that makes everything look purple.

hope it helps.
keep experimenting
Matthew

[Ragnarok]

I really like the first one, most of the drow images I've seen portrait them with violet skin.
The hair is a bit too warm imho. Having a cold background, cold clothes and dark skin makes the warm hair disbalance it a bit.

I made a little overpaint (I just adjusted the hue and saturation of the hair, to make my point clear, hope you don't mind)


_________________
"Ever forward, my darling wind." -Master Yuppa
Seigetsu

[Kagri]

No, of course I don't! And I agree with you, it looks must more balanced this way, like tho whole picture is just seen from some cold-blue glass.

But I've finally contacted the guy who originally asked me to draw her, and he said that the closest version is #3, because their skin is just dark-grey. So I guess I'll have to work on that one.

Matthew, I changed her nose, I guess she goes look more natural this way. Here's what came out:



And Ragnarok, I didn't even think about the hair! Eventhough there are more warm colours on the 3rd picture, I guess they still are a lil bit too warm. So I tried to do what you did with the part of the hair which is exposed to the light, only I seem to have really big probs with Hue. How could you make it so natural? When I change Hue from polar colours (red-blue), the colours start looking way too BRIGHT. So I try to change Saturation, and then they are looking way too gray. So here's the result with changing colour balance, but it doesn't quite look like yours (and those bright blue spots are disturbing):



So how'd you do it??

[Ragnarok]

I didn't do anything special, I selected the hair with the lasso tool and then applied a Hue and Saturation adjustment layer, with -30 Hue and -20 Saturation, something like that.

Oh, and I used Photoshop.
_________________
"Ever forward, my darling wind." -Master Yuppa
Seigetsu

[Kagri]

Heh, okay, I'll remember that!

And I guess this is the final version then:



Thanks everybody for your help.