Girl in snow, but not sad

[avram]

It’s the slow season at work. The advantage to being employed is that I get paid anyway. The down side is spending the day in the office not really doing very much. So I figured why not get in some drawing time?

This one’s based loosely on the woman who sits across the partition from me. They way her hair hung half-loose, silhouetting her face as she put on her coat, really struck me.





I’m still swiping coloring tricks from Ian McConville. This time, not just the 30% blue-black Multiple shading layer, but also the Overlay layer on top of that to intensify both the shadows and the brights. And then, to unify the colors and give it a sense of dim blueish lighting, I duped the whole thing (sans background and vapor trail) to a new file, flattened it, desaturated it, blurred it, ran Flaming Pear’s Ghost filter on it, dragged that back into the main file, colored it blue-black, merged it with a flat 35% opacity blue-black layer, and set that to Multiply. I’m pretty happy with it.

Tomorrow I’ll look at it from work, and get pissed off at how washed-out it looks with the crappy Windows screen gamma.

Comments

Nice job

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I like that a lot.

Re: Nice job

[avram]

Thanks.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

First, I like the sketch also.

Second, did all the Illustrator trickery you describe take longer than the actual drawing? A couple weeks back at school, people were talking about how Photoshop takes longer than darkroom work.

[avram]

I didn’t time it, but yeah, it probably did. That’s not unusual. Even with paint, making a color image often takes a lot longer than making a black-and-white one.