That's the problem with coloring others' lineart, it can lead others to a mistaken view of your overall skills -- and subterfuge is something useful, but when people realize that their impressions were mistaken, it's bothersome to deal with.
I feel this is much better than previous works precisely because it is all mine. I definitely agree it has flaws.. the facial structure probably is a bit wrong, I've kicked it around a lot and currently he looks a little fat in the face, where he was too thin before. Ironically perhaps my human drawing skills have come a long way.. For instance, the fact that the 'Ninja (2004)'s face even makes much sense shape-wise was due to a lot of help from someone ('Finite', if i recall correctly -- yeah, same finite who has a gallery here.). you can thank him for the non-deformity of the ninja's nose, particularly.
Just did another update. Depth should be much improved. maybe too much :) and antialiasing.. also, I learnt a shading trick from Henk Nieborg's work which I applied on the hair -- it makes shading a much quicker business.
Its quite good - trying to push yourself with these colors is quite hard. Not to be rude but your latest works seem to be lacking compared to your older works. Your anubis is one of my fav pieces ever - but then you post this.....
Lawrence: I spent a long time on the face, and I agree it still doesn't look right. Your suggestion about AA worked out; by the time you read this it should be updated (inc improvements to the facial structure).
THE KAPPTIN: L*a*b is a colorspace. L specifies brightness, a and b specify color characteristics. Its key feature is that L is linear.. that is, doubling the L value will make a color twice as bright; and that a and b don't effect color brightness at all (contrast this with HSV, where all components definitely do effect brightness). Its characteristics make it a better candidate for making colorcubes than RGB or HSV.
Colorcube just means a palette that is based on all possible combinations of the components, in N steps. So , a 3*** L*a*b palette has 27 colors (3*3*3 -- 3 steps in each dimension) .. to get a particularly useful palette you adjust some of the values for a few entries (for instance, an L=0 color really should occur only once, so you boost it to an intermediate value for everything but the designated black color).
Load the image into an editor and look at its palette if you wanna know the palette I'm using. All the colors, even the unused ones are included.
Mordalles: No; I don't have a split personality either :) Actually I've never come across anyone using the *exact* same username 'neota' as I do, anywhere. Why do you ask?
I quite like the use of different colours in the hair definitely, but I don't think the face lives up to the great quality of the hair IMHO. Also, I'm probably being very picky here, but you could probably anti-alias all of this by re-using each colour. What I do is take every colour in the palette and order them by brightness (keeping in mind blues are darker to the human eye and greens are lighter). I think the effect created by that kind of all-inclusive anti-aliasing would nicely match the dynamic colour usage in the hair. Nevertheless, cool piece.
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