Hard drive shut down.  Bringing it to a friend to install a new one.  Traumatic..."Good bye.  Take care.  Please come back to me.."

More like it...I started adding some pinks and fuschias, colors that I have never worked with before.  (On my last trip to Europe, I was in Prague and went to the Alphonse Mucha Museum and bought this chocolate bar with his print on it.  The predominate color was reds and tones of reds and that inspired the color choice of this illustration).  This illustration is about the splendor of Spring, in all it's breath taking and long awaited metamorphisis.  I am in the midst of a divorce and this illustration...well...it's a gift to myself.  The Buddhist saying is "There was never a Winter without a Spring" and now, it's my Spring.  Enough of that...
You can see how well the colors are mixing now that all that black is gone.  And that's how it would really be in Nature.  I love the color of the background.  I love grey.  My friends probably think I'm crazy because, yes, I do wear a lot of neutral colors.  But you see, pure saturated colors pop off a neutral gray; when I paint traditionally, I mix my colors against a grey palette.  I'll never paint without that.  It's a tablet of small sheets of grey called Grey Matters Paper Palette (Jack Richeson & Co. Inc) and what works with traditional will work with digital.
Now that I've already worked out a drawing I really like, have a "schematic" for my lights and darks (which I refer to all the time to make sure I capture the original intent of the black and white and I do have that version up all the time to reference when I apply the color), all I have to do is choose my saturated color shadows and continue to render everything in color.  I know better what to expect and the illustration does not "run away from me" because I am wrestling with everything all at once.

It's been a ride in the last two weeks.  I unwittingly downloaded OS X Mavericks onto my big Mac and POOF! it killed my connection to the internet, Photoshop and disabled my Wacom tablet.  And hey!  Was re acquainting myself with this file last night and discovered my favorite brushes are gone as well!  Been on the phone with Apple for days now; each step making it worse.  And the moment I clicked that "install" button, my contact at Disney sent me a text letting me know that a lot of work was on the way!  My only option at this point, Scott the Apple guy said, was to pray we could still back up on an external hard drive, then erase my entire hard drive.  Back up took 3-4 days; I was praying I did not crash.  My regular back up decided to call it quits too so I might have lost those files.  Then my car refuses to start in this hot weather; it's like Russian Roulette; sometimes it starts, and sometimes it leaves my daughter and I stranded.  So, been on the phone with my friends, begging rides to pick her up and drop her off at school, to buy groceries, etc.  Will be on the phone again with Apple this morning because I'm not out of the woods yet.  Got internet, got my Adobe programs re installed~and what a hassle that was.  Adobe sucks with technical support.  You can no longer get a live technician on the phone anymore; if you have a problem, you are screwed.  I had to have Scott walk me thru a series of convoluted steps to get access to a program I bought for a lot of money...

Okay, now for the business at hand here.  I am teaching myself the process of digital painting, which, I am finding out is VERY different from traditional painting.  First stab at digital is to establish tonal values and tell the story and mood with light, seen in an earlier post.  I then took that black and white and added color.  Mmmm....the results are, as you seen at the top, drab, drained, dead.  Ick.  Yuck.  So I decided to do a completely different tonal value start, this time with my beloved sepias, the way I would with my acrylics.  In traditional shadow; I use Burnt Umber and Alizarine Crimson with either Cad Red Light (for warmer shadows) and Manganese Blue (for cooler shadows); but for this illustration I chose a brown in more of a yellow range, not red.  Yeah, I painted it again, but in Photoshop, it did not take very long.  The steps and knowledge were already rehearsed.  And now I know why many of you, when you paint your illustrations, the color is like it was for me; dead.  Start with sepia tones, not black and white.