Leagues

What started out as a cover for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne, went a bit on it's own direction. It's been really interesting and yet, difficult to color my stuff recently. With the detail I put into my linework, it gets to a point where I can't really render anything. It'll only take away from the illustration. It has to get to a point where the color will only add to the scene, and in this case, add another level of intensity to it. At first, my plan was to color it in shades of blue... Ocean=Water=Blue. Seems simple enough.
But as I thought about it, the cool blues didn't fit with the scene at all. This surrounded diver fighting for his life. I always love to lay down a few shades of one color and then experiment with the Hue and Saturation. When I got to the red, it seemed to fit perfectly and gave it even more potency.
In the process of this- after the playing around with an infinite number of color palettes- I was trying to add some soft elements here and there, but they never worked. One, for example, the light shining out of the helmet was a much softer, more blurry element around the diver. Against the sharp flats in the rest of the image, it just didn't seem right.
Anyways, I like how it came out and the flats were just fine for me. Let me know what you think!
-Johnny