It's another Wicked Women lesson! I'm at a point where my blog posts are a little behind my work and it's nice to have to have the space to breath... Normally, I'm playing catch-up trying to get my paintings ready Sunday for Monday (if I'm lucky). Not this time! I actually have all of the paintings for the book completed, so next week we'll be able to jump into Photoshop.
This is especially handy since I just tore apart my studio.
That room has been a horrible maroon color since we bought the house three years ago. It's killing me to work in that space so I just decided it was time to paint. Now. No more excuses - it just needs to get done.
Til that's done, it's digital work for me!
Today is an overview of a complete, start-to-finish painting. I chose the stepmother from Cinderella. First, we'll go through a series of images. Then, I have a video posted at the end that shows a sort of time-lapse of the process.
As with the previous lesson, I like to paint the colors in a certain order. I painted the skin tones and hair on all of the outfits first. The skin tone is very faint in this image.
Next, I blocked in large swathes of color. I started with the black and, after that dried, I added the green tones. Keep these initial colors light. With watercolors, you can make a color darker but it's almost impossible to make it lighter.
Keep building up color. Here, I added the hair color to the girls and continued building up the tones of the stepmother's hair.
More of the same. Keep building up colors from lightest to darkest.
Details are starting to emerge. I painted the girls' faces and added shading to their hair. I started adding some shadows to everything as well.
I learned with an earlier painting that shadows need to go in BEFORE painting the pattern. I very nearly scrapped my Queen of Hearts and started over because of this issue. I'll be using that as my Photoshop example, so more on that then... Painting the brocade pattern was the most time consuming part.
More shadows, more details, more of the same....
Finally painted the base color. I need to play around with the scanner settings - everything ended up more washed out than it should have.
And the final image. Which isn't really the FINAL image. I'll do some editing in Photoshop. I really try to have a light touch in Photoshop. I want these to still retain the hand-painted look and hand-painted imperfections.
Finally, the video walk-through. Let me know what you think of adding animations. I kind of like it and might do more in the future.
That brocade might have been horribly time consuming, but it also looks fantastic. I also love the skull necklace and the black lace collar. Beautiful work.
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