March 3rd, 2006 |
I thought I'd show you some closer up shots for reference. Let's quickly go through the whole process again.
|
|
|
|
|  |
|
|
|
|
Here, of course, is where we start. Lots of work to do here.
|
|
|
|
|
|  |
|
|
|
|
|
Let's jump up to the hair and the nicer sky background. There are a lot of nice highlights going on in that hair. Most of those actually came from me drawing on top of the hair, not the reference photo itself.
|
|
|
|
|
|  |
|
|
|
|
|
I'm working here on smoothing out a lot of the blurry noise in the skin tones. There are splotches of pink, green and blue all over there that I know are not there on Inga's skin. The problem with having this piece printed is that now matter what if they're there at all on screen they will look ten times worse when they're printed.
|
|
|
|
|
|  |
|
|
|
|
|
Zombie? Heck no. This layer of edits was working out the lights and darks with this. It ended up being quite helpful to set this layer on multiply and a low opacity, or at least using it as a guide for where to lay down some future layers.
|
|
|
|
|
|  |
|
|
|
|
|
Now we're dropping in some darker skin tones without going black. I want to make it rich and toned, not drab and muted.
|
|
|
|
|
|  |
|
|
|
|
|
Now some cosmetic touch ups. Inga was looking too far off to her left. Her eyes weren't matching the position of her head. While this is a completely natural thing to do in real life, it can be very distracting in photos. I've "adjusted" her eyes, put some dark definitions in her eyebrows, and worked on the shape of her mouth. It's a little overwrought, but again, we're going for "pushed far"...
|
|
|
|
|
|  |
|
|
|
|
|
A bit too So-Cal? Heck yeah. This is the opposite end of that zombie swing. I started out working out lights and darks and now moved on to colors. So let's combine the two and see where we end up.
|
|
|
|
|
|  |
|
|
|
|
|
Through a combination of overpainting and photo manipulation I tried to stay as close to true as possible, but the darn source photo ended up getting the best of me. It's close, and I like it - but it's just not close enough. I lost some of that nice Wynona Rider quality, some detail of the nose and chin just wasn't there to enhance or recreate. So let that be a lesson to you - start off with a good photo!
|
|
|
|
|
|  |
|
|
|
|
|
(see closeups on page 2!)
|
|
Syndicated