Early Look: Cactus 🌵✨ + steps & my thought process!

Hello again! ☺️ I hope you’ve all been having a lovely day/night ✨

Here’s the finished colored version of my cactus girl! 🥳 and I included some steps for you to swipe through and see a bit of the process too ✨ Stay tuned for a process video of this drawing that I’ll be posting very soon for all Big-Hearted Butterfly patrons & Devoted Dragonfly patrons! 🎞✨

Usually when I start coloring a drawing I have a plan in mind of how I want the colors to look, but sometimes that plan ends up changing to something completely different! 🙈With this drawing I wanted to focus on reds and greens in my color scheme, like this palette:

But as I worked, the mood just didn’t look right because there weren’t any cool colors to balance all the warmth. It was difficult to make the character feel like she was in a space/environment because of a lack of shadow and darkness to contrast the light, so I realized I would need to add some darker shadow. But using red as a shadow color can cause the colors to look brown, so I started to shade with magenta and purple on a multiply layer, which are closer to red on the spectrum but introduce a colder look.

So here you can see that I added some purple shadow around the lower edge of the canvas and then it started to balance out the warmth a bit more! I wanted to maintain the glowy pink light coming up from the bottom, so I just erased the purple from those areas which created sort of a back-lit look to the character, which I didn’t plan but I ended up really liking! 🥰 So I worked on increasing the back-lighting visuals by adding some rim light to the edges of the cactuses and the character’s figure.

At this point, I still felt like the overall color scheme was a bit too monochromatic (everything was very magenta/red/pink), so that’s when I started to experiment with introducing another color to contrast it.

And the color that came to mind was yellow/orange! 🌼 I chose to go with a golden glow at the bottom because yellow and purple are complementary colors on the color wheel, which means they’re opposites and can create a really strong contrast when used together side by side.

After that, everything started to tie together and I was okay with abandoning my original color scheme of red & green! 🙈 So I learned that it’s okay to completely change course in the middle of a drawing and I don’t need to stick to just one idea ☺️ I never thought I would like the look of a yellow background with purple cactuses! 🙈😅

Anywho, I hope you all like it!! 💛 I want to make a tutorial video in the future all about color schemes & color palettes so we can chat more about stuff like this! ✨ It’s so much fun 🥰

Have an amazing day/night everyone!! 🌵

Love,

Lydia 💌