DISCLAIMER: My choices for capturing this image -- at 4:30 in the morning in an otherwise sleeping house -- were either:
1. Fail repeatedly to adjust the scanner settings to pick up anything other than a REALLY overexposed, desaturated image with unfixably blotchy reds, or
2. Use my shitty, shitty cell phone camera and play around with the lighting until said camera captured an image that retained the basic depths of color to allow me to fiddle with it in photoshop enough to make it look acceptably like what I ACTUALLY PAINTED.

As you may have surmised, I chose the latter. No, I cannot figure out how to fix the purple and yellow gradient effect. Just... kinda squint a little and pretend to be selectively colorblind and you'll generally get the idea.

I WILL figure out how to get an accurate scan or photo of this work tomorrow and the FINAL-final version will have no background anyway.

(ARTIST TECH TIME: The issue, I believe, is the shirt. My hand-paintings like this are all done almost entirely using watercolor pencils, which allow me to control subtle hues, blend colors, apply color very evenly, and "color inside the lines" in a way I simply cannot master by applying wet paint directly to the paper. Frankly, I don't think watercolor as a medium was necessarily INTENDED to allow for this kind of precision work, despite the fact that -- maddeningly -- I know plenty of artists who are capable of even greater control, subtlety and intensity of color, and fine detail using the same medium. And I'm still primarily using brushes size 0/18, plus or minus a size or two, for about 80% of the work I do on any hand-painted piece in my gallery. For those of you who do not speak Artist Lingo, size 0/18 means "small enough to paint the details of your mother's twinkle cave onto your thumb nail, or a creative closeup of its most virtuous parts on your pinkie." Fullview of this picture on most screens will display it significantly larger than the actual artwork.

Anyway, back to the issue... It's about those watercolor pencils. I have spent a bloody king's ransom on sets and individual pencils and I cannot -- absolutely CANNOT -- find anything that even comes CLOSE to a true scarlet. I have an entire pencil case that contains nothing but variations on different producers' definition of "red" which range from sunset-salmon to poppy-orange but not a single one even comes close to a color you could apply to the Red Queen's roses and avoid having your head chopped off. I could probably prick a finger and paint with my own damn BLOOD and -- even accounting for the rusting effect over time -- end up with truer reds than any fucking pencil seems to be able to give me.

I have only one source of true scarlet watercolor, which is in a set like the kind you envision kindergarteners using to paint, only this is a really high-quality set that was given to me by the painter I was apprenticed to some time ago. I have no clue who the producer is -- there are no markings on any part of its case. Not even so much as a "made in China" stamp on the plastic. So that's the red I used for the shirt -- because THAT'S WHAT COLOR GOMER'S SHIRT IS. What seems to have happened is that in trying to blend watercolor-pencil marks on the paper with wet paint, I must have applied too much wet paint mixed with too much pigment for it to be absorbed by the paper and create a matte finish. This means there are bits on the shirt of sort of caked-up pigment that are shiny in direct light.... which is all a scanner can apply to what it scans.

I believe I will be able to get a very good, accurately-colored, high-quality image of the painting using my sister's camera on a tripod, affixing the corners to a flat surface to keep the paper from curling the tiny amount it has, and lighting it at an angle using a bright full-spectrum light lamp I have recently liberated from my parents. Once I have a version of this picture that is of high enough quality, I can digitally erase the background and upload the final image for Gomer to put over whatever background he wants.

This, incidentally, is now I did ALL of the title cards I ever made for Tony Helms -- the guy who does Horrorcast with Dena on TGWTG -- only THOSE paintings were all about half the size of this one. I did them with the paper aligned horizontally, you see, because then it's about the same dimensions of a title card and I can more accurately pose and place the figures I paint knowing they will fit onto the premade backgrounds I had done for the Random Odds cards.

...I am SO never going to be able to get paid enough to justify this amount of neurotically obsessive work that I COULD have just drawn and colored using the Cintiq, but... I did almost all the work on this piece either during down time at my regular job, or in places that are too cramped to allow me to use the Cintiq. Also... this is the technique I grew up with, was apprenticed to do, and just... really, really love doing.)

If anyone seriously actually read all of that, I will have my min BLOWN, yo.