Aztecs Revised

It's been a while since the last time I worked on these, so I decided pick 'em back up. I was originally just going to work on page 2 today, but as I was playing around with the color, I thought of some edits for page 1.

First off, I noticed that the orange and teal where waaay too dark in both pieces, so I lightened them up. Then I gave the lead lizardman some abstract reflected light. For more "pop", I varied up the colors in the 2nd panel and spread around the sky color in the 3rd. I'm only just now discovering how much some sutble gradiants can add.

And now page 2.....

I'm actually not done with this yet, but you can see that I'm trying to be more effective with the lighting. I can't believe it never accured to me to make the lizardmen in the back lighter. It looks a lot better. I haven't quite decided if I'm going to colorize their contour lines, or keep them black.

Speaking of contour lines, I touched those up here and there (mostly just in panel 1).

I want to keep the last two panels pretty monotone. In panel 3, I'll just add some flat value to enhance the forground and background. In panel 4, I might just drop in some slight gradiants.

Though I'm going against the cardinal rule of "powering through with no backtracking", I'm glad I re-thought my approach with pages 1&2. I'll have a better idea of how to handle the coloring of 3 & 4. It'll be good to have these pages completed. Not only to I want to finish the story, but I'm itching to do some new pages and gauge my artistic growth. These pages were drawn 2 years ago.