Halloween 2016 may be gone, but it seems I have some Monster Heads left in me. I made this finned fellow in the vector art program extraordinaire Affinity Designer. This wasn’t my first attempt at a variation of one of the younger members of Universal Studios’ classic collection of celluloid creatures. I had tried several others that I abandoned. The shapes I was cooking up just weren’t working, but his one stuck with me, and I stuck with it.
I approached this one a little differently after I tried to print my other monsters on a digital press. When I was designing my previous creatures, I stuck with Affinity Designer’s default RGB color space Wide Gamut RGB which results in magically gorgeous colors on a monitor but looks sort of sad and muddy when translated to a four color or process (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK) color space. I decided to design the gill-man in CMYK or process colors. They look a little dull on the display particularly when compared to my other characters, but I would get something that would look a lot nicer in print.
I ran into a problem when trying to save this image out to post to Flickr and ultimately this website. Switching from CMYK to RGB (the color space of cameras and displays) resulted in Circus colors. Everything appeared over-saturated and entirely too loud. I tried a few of the color spaces within Affinity, but they weren’t doing it for me. I could have chased down an answer in Affinity’s forums, but exported the vector illustration into Photoshop’s native PSD format and converted it to RGB. Adobe seems to have a smoother transition from one color format to the other. Yeah, I went with the familiar, but that won’t last forever. Affinity is always improving, and they’ll get there. I don’t intend on paying Adobe rent forever not when you can buy Affinity’s programs at a more than fair price.
He looks like he’s smiling! 🙂