Wednesday, January 12, 2011

mansuetude [noun]

(MAN-swi-tood) - mildness; gentleness

i figured it out! this year, the title of the blog will be whatever the word of the day is on dictionary.com. i've been feelin rather unedumacated as of late considering i haven't been in school for years nor do i read novels and things. so perhaps this will help me speak more intelligently than my usual rants of "ya know what i mean?" and "nope, i call bullshit on that!" maybe i can even back these silly rants with actual, thought-out sentences. (which, btw, i had a really hard time even coining the phrase "actual, thought-out sentences." that's how dumb i'm feeling right now!)

anyways, so ON with the new year! yays! something else i plan on starting this year is to post more progression images. now i'm no good with taking screen caps of the pieces i'm working on but that's what the layers in photoshop are great for! i just go back and turn off a layer to show how i work. hooray for technological advances.




so the progression shots are somewhat self-explanatory but maybe i'm wrong. obviously i start with the lineart. then i go in and put flat color on the piece for 2 reasons - first, it makes things a little easier to select if something needs to be changed in certain spots; second, it's easier for me to start with a base color and work up. then i start to put shadows in with colors like oranges, purples, and blues (as of late cuz i've always been a little fearful of blue on skintones). next are highlights and extreme highlights that are the really bright spots that make clothes just a little extra shiny. the final touch is usually the background and with this piece in particular, i added an extra layer of even more diamond shine to really help make it stand out. many hours later BOOM, 1 commission finished. =)
this was for a repeat client and i tried to get it to her before christmas since she was giving it to her brother. but i guess the blizzard that hit NY really slowed this down. what should've taken a 2-day Priority package to get to its destination turned into 5 days. nice. at least she liked it! (or at least that's what she tells me. who knows for sure!)

1 comment:

Jac V. said...

Neat! That's one thing people like to see on interviews (as I was told)... progression of your work. Not that you're going on any job interviews anytime soon, but it's a cool process to see. You should add in the preliminary sketch too! I think my fave is the flat colors. I don't know why. I think it has something to do with my love of old 80s cartoons!