Water effects

I did not work on this stuff long today. I experimented with water effects for her base, and brought up the highlights on her wraps.

For the water effects, I have a 'water effects' gel that dries transparent. I experimented with using it plain, mixing in paint, and mixing in ink. Plain, it dries clear, which is as expected. Mixing in paint, it dried opaque and with the paint color. That's pretty much what I expected; paint's purpose in life is to be opaque. Mixing it with ink, it maintained its transparency when it was applied thin, and was more opaque when applied thickly.

This picture is the experimental mixes after they've dried. The top swatch is the water effects over a base coat of the same color paint I used on the ghost's base. The pale green is mixed with paint, and the dark blue is mixed with ink. I also learned that the stuff colored with ink dries much darker than it looks wet.

This is the mix I'm using on her base. It is not yet dry. I wanted a greener color that I got in the experiments, so this is a mix of green ink and a touch of purple. I'm not real sure what color it will dry to. Here's hoping it's something close to what I had in mind.

And, here's the ghost with the brighter highlights and the water effects on her base. For the highlights, I used the Dark Flesh Highlight to keep is on the neutral side. Before, I was using a pale violet, which wasn't getting the look I wanted. It was too saturated compared to the rest of the piece, and helped make the wraps look too purple. This went much better. The blends could be a bit smoother most everywhere except her skin, but I think I'm going to call this one and move on once the base is done. I experimented with a number of things on this one - higher contrast in the skin tones (like it), new method for doing hair (should have practiced on an easier example first), different use of color (thumbs up with some reservations), and water effects (will have to see how that goes tomorrow).

This gel holds its shape as it dries, so I put in a choppy texture. I also left some of it very thin over the base color, hoping to get the transparency. Now there's just waiting for it to dry to see how it looks. Once it's dry, I'll hit the high points with a highlight so that it looks like there's some sea foam on the chop.Then some black around the edge of the base, and hopefully she'll be done.