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Step 3: Initial Paintover The crop I end up with is slightly smaller than the original screenshot, about 300x470 pixels. I do all my initial coloring and lighting at this
small size. Once I cropped the picture to my satisfaction, I then set up my typical layer arrangement for paintovers. The first layer I add is my
background. I fill this with a solid color. This color will set the mood and tone of the whole picture, and will affect the colors of the foreground. Just prior to this painting I had done my Black Ogre, with a very warm sunset palette. I wanted this one to be cooler, so I chose a light blue, a daytime sky color. That suggested a cold environment to me, so with the airbrush I painted in some whitish blobs and mooshed them around a bit until they started looking like something. In this case, mountains.
The second layer I add is a duplicate of my initial layer. This goes on top of the background layer. Since the background of the screenshot is all a solid gray, I used the background eraser tool to erase around the figure to let the sky and mountain layer show through. Then, using the airbrush and smudge tools, I went over the figure to smooth out the model textures.
The most critical thing at this step is to think about the lighting. Since I was thinking of this as a midday outdoor scene, I started thinking about lighting coming from above and to the right, so I
roughly highlighted those areas in a warmer lighter gray. I tried to keep some of the pink and green colors leftover from the original
texture as both pink and green are typical undertones for skin, even unusally colored skin like gray. At this point you don't have to be too exact with anything. You are working at a small scale and
everything is pretty fuzzy. The point is to get your lighting and palette consistant between the background and foreground at this stage. Thinking about light and color *first* saves you from
annoying repaints later in the process.
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All images and content ©2003-2004 Marie Rosé |
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In general you want any painting to have a certain balance to it. Since this portrait is focused heavily on the face, and we are not
going to have that much background, this means we should crop the picture to bring the head more or less centered in the frame, and the bulk of the head should be in the upper half. This is nice as it also
helps eliminate a bit of that extra shoulder/chest area that was making a big blank area in the lower half of the pic. I also gave a little bit of clearance for the topknot. I would probably only want to
crop that if my crop as a whole was much tighter around the face. 