You’ve got another winner there Marta! How many awards you got by now? Too bad you can’t put them on a shelve or something or maybe that’s a good thing. You’d be needing a cupboard by now I guess. 
The mag arrived today, so your tut’s going to be the first thing I’ll read tonight. Even though I don’t have Painter, it’ll still be great to see the steps you take.
Locked, Marta Dahlig (2D)
RicoD
#30
Very well… Awesome… :applause:
vivien82
#33
Well Marta, here are my usual 5 stars…boy am I boring when I comment your pieces 
Congratulations, it turned out beautifully and I am an extreme Bouguereau fan so I especially like this one for that reason! Brava!
acmontana
#34
Veramente elegante come risultato…un buon lavoro.
Really elegant as resulted… a good job.
Vedanta
#35
A lovely painting of light and delicate shade, your use of lost and found edges truly
enhances the plasticity of the form, and a contemporary looking face, beautifully done.
Lunatique
#38
Just curious, why use such soft edge at where her waist pinches in? It almost seems like you didn’t think about your edges when painting that area. I used to struggle with that too–not knowing where to have hard, soft, or lost edges, and it took a while to get a grip on it. In the end it really about where you want to lead the viewer’s eyes, and how you want to present a subject (in relation to other areas in an image).
BlacKeri
#39
I ran with the airbrush along the whole body (mostly visible on arms and waist) to add a “glowing” effect to the character, making her seem more soft and otherwordly and stand out a bit from her surroundings. It seems I didn’t acomplish my task exactly then. 
Lunatique
#40
Marta - I got your PM, and I’ll reply here so that it might help others with similar frutrations, or those who’s got a handle on it can join in the discussion.
Edges was one of my problems too (and it still may be), and I had researched or asked the artists I respected, or read up on the subject in books and online. My current approach is this (and this is just my personal approach):
-Edges that are hard are either objects that need to appear hard-edged in order to look right or have the proper effect in the image (for example, the gleaming blade that caresses the vulnerable bare neck of a woman, and the blade itself is vital to the message of the image), or used in areas of interest where you want to draw the eyes.
-Soft edges are for areas that need the softness (for example, a teddy bear in a scene), or areas where you don’t want things to stand out too much (background objects), or used to help contrast areas that need to pop out with harder edges.
-Lost edges are for areas that you really want to push back into the image and not cause attention, and for lighting falloff where the light is no longer causing enough contrast in the scene.
The soft/lost edges can also be used to help gel foreground/background elements together so they don’t appear like paper cutouts in the scene–to harmonize the various elements in an image, so to speak. They can also be used to depict areas that are out of focus or further away, but there are two approaches to this. I’ll elaborate:
Approach 1 - To mimic what the camera sees–where the depth of field is locked in a given moment, and the focused/unfocused planes are very obvious and well separated.
Approach 2 - To convey what the human eye sees–which cannot be locked in a given moment, because our eyes can only see one tiny area clearly at a time, and the areas in our peripheral vision aren’t necessarily always in a different focus plane–they just aren’t in that “sweet spot” where our eyes can see clearly. If you really look at your surroundings, you’d be surprised by just how tiny of an area our eyes actually can focus on at any given moment–roughly an inch or so of space. But to do a painting with only a tiny area of clear detail would be frustrating (but it might be cool as an experiment). So what some artists do is to paint the overall image as if the eyes are looking at the entire scene in not an instant, but slightly longer period of time, stopping at various areas of interest. So this approach would have hard/soft/lost edges according to what areas the artist would want you to pay attention to.
But then again, there are artists who do not typically rely on using soft or lost edges to convey distance or areas of focus–they prefer to use values, colors, brush stroke, brush size, texture…etc to convey that information (Craig Mullins is a good example).
I hopes this helps. It’s one thing to know this stuff intellectually, but to apply them creatively is another story. I struggle with it too, just like the rest.
system
#42
WOOOw! Beautiful art work as always Marta. The skin are sooo marvelous…i can´t say to much …just that this painting are superb. A galaxy of stars for you.
:applause:
<3
Migsta
#47
I cant help but look at the keyhole/arm tangent. The image as a whole is nice, but that keyhole looks like its dangling from her arm instead of being on her chest…maybe a lighting/shading issue as mentioned before.
