Step 4: Enlarge and Refine: shading and facial details


Once I have  the rough lighting down, it is time to start refining, adding texture and beginning to put in details.  To do this, the painting has to be larger.  Using the resize tool, I enlarge the picture by 150%  (now around 470x730 pixels) This makes the picture somewhat "jaggy" or pixelated (you can especially see this around the hair and background).  However, the jaggies are easy enough to smooth out either with the smudge tool or with a low opacity airbrush.

At this point I realized that I had never painted a face with overhead lighting before.  So I had to hunt around to find some references.  The main one I used was this one, a stock photo at DeviantArt.  Using that to guide where my shadows should fall, I started putting in more highlights and shading the appropriate areas on the face and neck. 

For the most part I used the airbrush for this, medium to small brush sizes, on around 70%-80% density and 5%-15% opacity.  Using mostly short scribbly strokes like you would with acryllics you can get an acryllic-like texture.  For the highlights I used warm light grays, with hints of yellow and orange.  For the midtones, bluer and greener colors with some pink.  Shadows are blue and purple primarily.

I also started adding in some more details to the face, like eyebrows, defining the nose and painting in color and texture to the lips and a bit of blue reflection lighting to the far side of the face. I  pretty much left the hair and background alone and concentrated on getting my shading headed the right direction
 

Step 5: Refine: Background

The background was starting to bug me at this point, so I turned my attention away from the face and started working on cleaning up the background.  Again, thinking about the direction and the source of my light (the sun) I begane working in more colors and shapes into the background to make my mountains. Notice that by keeping the lighting consistant between the foreground and background (both in intensity and direction as well as color) my ogre is starting to feel like he is "there" in the picture instead of a guy pasted atop a background (which is what he is, but we're trying to fake it...)

The snow was pale yellows and oranges, while the shadows were made with blue and purple. To connect the forground and backround I used some of the warm brownish grays in the areas of trees and rocks, as well as some deep greeny yellows.  Most of the "green" in the trees is actually dark yellow rather than dark green.

Most of the large areas were a soft low opacity airbrush.  However for the finer edges I use the paintbrush tool set to vary Opacity and Thickness with pen pressure on my tablet (these can be set in the Brush Variance palette.)  Typically I use a very small brush (less than 10 pixels) on fairly high opacity and almost 100% density (if not at 100% density)  This is also what I use to paint my hair textures and to add fine highlighting to the edges of shiny things (like eyes and lips)

goto Step 6

All images and content ©2003-2004 Marie Rosé
Last updated Thursday, October 21, 2004