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zmeess:

digital fanart of Caleb Widogast and Essek Thelyss from critical role, cropped to only show their hands. Caleb's hand is drawn palm up, with nine imperfect white pearls lying in the center of it; Essek's left hand is cupping Caleb's from below, and his right is curled at the edge of Caleb's palm, as if he's just poured the pearls into his hand. the painting employs a limited palette of shades of teal, purple, and orange.ALT

for how much Caleb has changed Essek, i can never stop thinking about how much Essek has changed Caleb. Caleb looked at Essek and thought, this is a man whose knowledge i might be able to use to change my past. but when Caleb convinces him to share that knowledge, the first thing Essek teaches him is how to control his future

tip jar

and here are the progress shots for this picture!

i had a lot of notes on this one, but tumblr ate my draft and now i’m too angry with it to type the entire thing up again. the only thing i will mention:

as i was compiling the above image, i noticed that the final painting appeared quite a bit more saturated and high-contrast than the previous progress shot when put next to each other, even though i didn’t touch up or color correct it at all. i thought that some might be curious as to what the heck had happened, so here’s an explanation:

  1. i added an off-white vignette; the only other things in the painting that are as light as it are the highlights on the pearls and Essek’s rings and nails, and the vignette made them pop by providing a point of reference for the eye
  2. i added a brighter orange highlight to Caleb’s thumb and the lower part of his palm below it (a quick internet search has informed me that that part is called the thenar eminence, and i was like damn, good to know). the reason i did that is because that plane is almost perpendicular to the direction of the main light source, but the whole endeavor also had a nice little bonus in the form of brightening up the overall picture
  3. i added some small patches of shadow to Essek’s right hand that were a more saturated purple than the colors around it

these were very small additions, but imo they made a big difference in how the colors appear to the viewer. i find it awesome how sometimes you don’t need to color correct the whole picture to give it a more nuanced and impactful feel, because adding a few small contrasting elements (or similarly colored, depending on what you want to achieve) might be enough. the takeaway here is that color is always relative and heavily depends on the surroundings, which i honestly find very sexy of her