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[ellenmillion]

I hath tweeted:

• 11:46 Mondaily post: ellenmillion.livejournal.com/971208.html #
• 22:15 I have a new definition of evil: black fur in watercolor. Too hard! *goes to bed* #

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[eregyrn.livejournal.com]

22:15 I have a new definition of evil: black fur in watercolor. Too hard! *goes to bed*

Aww! If it helps, I never do Wasp's fur in black, either. The wolf he's based on was all-black in his youth, and then gradually faded as he got older (going by the photos on Monty's site). Therefore, since Wasp is middle-aged, I do him with fur that's greying-out. I've never done him with the darkest grey-near-black. I've always hit the middle greys with him. (He's a bit light in the MAPP. The colors in the Racing piece are probably accurate.)

For me, it's the problem that I use Copics on a coated matte finish photo paper (I print out my linework on that, and color over it; just as you were saying about doing that with hotpress watercolor paper, it's great, the lines are very black and unsmearable, and you don't have to worry about erasing your pencil work and damaging the surface or anything). The Copics are, of course, transparent ink. So when I scan, the light bounces back from the paper surface, through the color. Any scan of my color work is inevitably lighter than the original; sometimes that's a good thing. But what drives me nuts is you can't get any really DARK darks. I often put shadows in with Photoshop later.

If you ever really do need to do black-black fur in watercolor, I would suggest the comics-inking approach, which is what I've been using for both black hair and black fur. That is, you just ink it in black in the inking stage, leaving plenty of highlights. Then at least the black is black, and you just have to color in the highlights. In terms of wolves, I'm still in the experimental stage on this, but I had to use it extensively in my calendar piece (which involves both an elk, and Farscout's wolf Flea, who's *really* black. :P )