Thank you Photoshop!

Just finished another coloring book! I love doing coloring books! So much fun! In the process I learned how much I absolutely love Photoshop!! Thank you, thank you, thank you for Curves, Layers, Levels and Hue/Saturation! It's so easy to get tunnel vision and for your palette of colors to get way too narrow. This happened to me on the cover. Here's the image chosen by the art director to be the cover. This is just the linework that appears within the book.

I then proceeded to color it. And guess what I thought I was done. Here is that image.

After looking at it I realized that my contrast was crappy. My background was muddy. The foreground characters were getting lost. So I pulled out the Curves, Hue/Saturation and Levels to push and pull my colors. When I finally got something I liked it looked like this.

Now truth be told if I had more time I would have posted this to a few groups I frequent online and let my art peers tear into it. Pick the advice that I thought was the most on point and went back in and reworked those areas. But I am glad that I am getting better at seeing what's wrong with my own images. (Not the best, but better.)

Every image we do is a lesson to be learned about what we are bad at and need to get better and what we are good at...and still need to get better. I'll let you know when the book becomes available for purchase!! :)