Same guy, 30 years apart
Full views here [If you're a minor or know me IRL, please avert your eyes lest I die of humiliation, thanks]
You’ve clearly been talented quite a long time, but it seems like your recent Scarecrow pieces seem like a real progression in your style. Have you been doing anything deliberate to improve your art? I really love what you’ve been doing.
Oh thank you anon!
I've been beating my head against the wall of self-loathing for decades and finally broke through to paint with the reckless abandon of the unadulterated inability to give a shit!
lol jk (sort of), if you're talking about the two recent scarecrow paintings, I've been trying to paint in grayscale to get the values better before then coloring in blending layers over it (in traditional media, you'd use an underpainting and then glaze over it). It's got its up and downs. I certainly have a better grip on chiaroscuro, but it's also been much more difficult to control my colors and paint as vibrantly. The maggot-scarecrow painting had me screaming for a week trying to figure out how to color it. This technique worked well for dark and moody paintings where the colors are allowed to be a little more muddy, but idk if I could/would still use it for a particularly vibrant painting. I'm still learning!
For example, here's a grayscale WIP and its colored counterpart. The lighting is there, but the colors are still not quite where I want them to be. Whereas in this Karlach painting, the colors are bursting, but the lighting is a little confused and the figure is flatter.
Here's a video from a guy that both shows you the method as well as his distaste for it :'D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJitss58XKc
Like, it's definitely possible to get vibrant colors with that technique, I'm just not there yet (if I decide to stick with this).
I made a bluesky for nsfw and/or excessive gore/blood, Here If you know me IRL, please avert your eyes lest I die of humiliation, thanks. ✌️
Thinking more about Scarecrow's mask turned into doing a variety of burlap sacks based on phobia themes whoOPS