Outcast Odyssey: Photoshop Designs - Adding detail and colour

I took the last design from each of the character sheets that I had created and started to add intricate detail to the clothing in which I altered the arrangement slightly by using the transform tool to manipulate the size and rotation of the selection. In the first design I wanted to add a pattern in the jacket collar adding badges to the second part of the colour. I decided to only add the pattern to the collar as I did not want the rest of the composition to look cluttered once I had applied colour to the lineart; The jacket needed some intricate detail to work with the steam punk fashion. I decided to add goggles to the first design as it worked well with the narrow eyes and hair that the compositions contained, it worked successfully with the rest of the clothing. The detail on the second design mainly consisted of badges and sewn on patches to work with the aesthetic of the theme, I also added some clockwork such as cogs and gears to the shoulder armor as felt too plain without something added to it. I also added a few parts to the torso, such as a pocket and line to show variation in colour for when I start to add the colour scheme to the design. For the third design I used the same detail as the first design with the collar for the waistcoat, the waistcoat needed to be detailed to not only bring something to the composition but to work with the theme of steam punk.

First Design - detail

Second Design - detail

Third Design - detail

I then began to add colour to the designs in which I used inspiration from tutorials that I had gathered on Pinterest, on the same board that I used for reference material when drawing the basic figure for the designs. I wanted to use these tutorials for inspiration and merge these techniques with my own, in which I began to use gradients with in my work. I had never used gradients before and found that using gradients can either work really well or ruin the overall composition. I decided to experiment with this technique by using it on the first figures hair. At first I made a new layer and created the linear gradient on the layer, using the blending mode, multiply, to merge the two layers together. However I felt that the gradient was more successful on the same layer with the colour selected so that the gradient would only be applied to the hair. I then locked the lineart layer with the lock transparency pixels so that I could easily change the colour of the lines to a darker shade of the hair colour. Changing the colour of the lines helped to blend the lineart and the colours together, making it appear less harsh with the previous black of the lines. I continued this process with the next two designs however with the second design I did not add a gradient with the hair colour being white, instead I added a slightly darker grey blue to the bottom of the hair. I did not use a gradient as I knew it would make the white too grey compared to the white that I wanted for the design.

First Design - Adding colour

Second Design - Adding colour

Third Design - Adding colour
(example of  the harsh black lines against the hair)