Wally, I don’t know how to tell you this. But, I can give her a cheeseburger, but she’s not going to be able to eat it, she’s not real, she’s made of pixels....LOL
Here’s a little step by step on how I did this painting.
Starting with the original photograph, I do a rough sketch of the main features. I’m going to be using a black background so I used a yellow for the sketch.
With a soft round brush, using an Opacity of about 20% I start blocking in the main shapes of the highlights. Once the Base is down I do a second Layer adding more highlights. After each Layer I use a Gaussian Blur and adjust the Opacity of the layer. I use the Eraser tool where needed to clean up the shapes.
2nd page
With the sketch turned off the basic shapes of the body look like this.
With a soft round bush, again with the Opacity lowered to about 25% I start to add some shadows, under the chin and under the arm pit.
I don’t want to put too much time into this painting until I get the face and hair done.
With a finer brush at 100% opacity I add the lips, nostrils, eye lashes and eyebrows.
Reduce the opacity to about 10% with a soft round brush add some contours to the face. Shaping the nose, the eyes and cheeks. Adding a Gaussian Blur and adjusting the opacity on each layer.
3rd page
Continue adding shadows to shape the face. Then with a small soft round brush, with reduced opacity using white add some highlights to the nose, lips, eye lids, brows.
With a very small brush and black I draw in the teeth.
Finally, one of the most time consuming parts to an illustration like this is doing the hair. This is a complex hairdo with soft curls going in many different directions. The way I handled it was to start at the top, by her ear. With a soft round brush and white, I put dabs of white down. I then applied a Gaussian Blur. The with the Smudge tool selected and a fine brush I dragged through the white dabs. This gives the appearance of highlights on the hair and fine hairs. In the bottom pile of curls, using the same technique I make curls and swirls going in different directions on several separate layers. To finish off the hair, using a very fine brush, alternating between white and gray I add individual hairs where needed.
After the face and hair are done, I work in the same way on different details of the image. Highlights and shadows, building the image, working your way down, finer and finer.
