Morning Yawn [Low Res] (Patreon)

There's a small experiment I wanna attempt more of, You know those JRPG key art illustrations from, say, FF9 or the title screen from Kingdom Hearts 2? the kind that looks like extremely washed out soft watercolors and where the white of the page does a ton of the lifting and it makes it all look ethereal? I know I've seen artists before emulate that digitally, but while I reverse engineer the process, here is a first attempt with a very sleepy Shuu who just got up too early and got ready for training.

People have in the past praised my color choices but I always feel like I'm barely doing anything other than gut instinct, I actually really want to improve, and got the idea of trying this from a recent interest in exploring how Chinese illustrators do things different, which in many many words made short, they pick the aesthetic of a piece and its "vibe" to chose ambient color, and THEN they do a palette based on that ambient color, which is reverse to how most artists I know do it. for example here my mistake was that I knew the ambient was gonna be "washed JRPG watercolor illustration with harsh white light and teal ambient", but I essentially colourpicked Shuu's colors from other refs before doing the washout rendering.

Second Image is just how I would color it normally with my usual cell shading-esque technique