Studying the (Paper Doll) Masters - Fanny Gray in Color

 Last week I started a study of Fanny Gray, one of the earliest American paper dolls. I started with a pencil sketch, scanned it, and continued in Procreate from there.

The video above shows the 5 or so hours it took to line and color Fanny Gray in Procreate sped up to a 30 second video! One of the things I love about Procreate is that it automatically does this. I know how long I spend on a project and that's pretty great.

Here's the breakdown in photos.

The very first thing I did was distortion and proportion correction in Photoshop. There were a few stylistic changes that I made at this stage, like giving her a prettier face. I also find file setup up is easier in Photoshop. And then it was on to lines. Strong lines make it easier to cut out a paper doll. I also like to do any correcting at the line stage rather than tinkering with the final project. It's just easier. Here, I used a pencil brush to simulate the soft lines of the lithograph. I'll tell you right now, I didn't keep track of the brushes I used as well as I should have! 

I worked my way down the drawing at this point. I started with the hair, then the skin. Each section is on its own layer. For the face, I worked "back" to "front": first, the skin tone, then all of the features on top of that.  As for brushes, I tried to keep to dry media types - pencils, grainy brushes, etc. I really like the pencil and pastel brushes in this set from Design Cuts. (**That isn't an affiliate link or anything - I just really like this set**)
 

 

I continued down the drawing, working on the shawl and dress. I tried to pay attention to the colors and folds of the fabric. It's not obvious in the video, but I often look at my colors and adjust the saturation if the colors look too dull or flat. I did this quite a bit with the browns. Browns are the most difficult colors for me to work with digitally. 

The apron was tough. I'm not totally happy with the lines but it's ok. The basket was tough, too. I roughed in grass for the base instead of the very elaborate farm scene on the original. 

There are five outfits in the Fanny Gray set from 1854. It's a morality story and the clothing reflects this. The outfit with the cloak has Fanny barefoot, down on her luck, and selling matches. I didn't like that very much so in mine, she just gets a nice red cloak. It's all painted on one layer and I played with color and saturation a lot with this. The other outfit I drew has her holding a weird looking cat. Somehow, my cat is even weirder! I still may go back and work on that. As for the other two costumes, I haven't drawn them. Maybe I should! 

Because I needed to feel like this was "complete", I added tabs and laid it all out in Photoshop. This was a fun little exercise and I might try another one!