Hello and welcome to Sam’s step by step of Colours of the Wind. This isn’t a tutorial as such, more of a rambling of my thoughts and processes whilst creating this painting:
My tools are:
An intuos 3 A4 size tablet
Photoshop CS
Painter 8
Step 1:
This is the reference I used, as part of OFDW11, in the anatomy forums:
http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b380/rebeccak5/OFDW%20011/OFDW011_02.jpg
When I first saw the image, I immediately thought of a picture involving my screen namesake, Zephyri, a female spirit of storms and winds. So I grabbed my wacom and started doodling. The above is the result, just something very loose, to give me an idea of composition and colours. I already have the notion that parts of her will be insubstantial, or faded into the cloud, but that’s only hinted at here. This was all done in photoshop, mostly with the hard-edged brush, with opacity and flow set to 100. I only ever use the wacom’s pressure to fade off strokes, and use the dropper a lot!
I started with a solid colour silhouette of the figure, which helps me to place the figure and makes me pay more attention to proportions rather than getting bogged down in detail. The background is just a photoshop gradient with a few suggestive clouds scribbled on, to give me some idea of where my main light source will be. Note how I’ve used the background colour quite heavily in the shadows of the figure, as the colour would be reflected onto the body. I’ve also changed the colour of the highlights on her body, and to some degree the shadows, as it moves further up the body, away from the light source, grading from a yellow to a softer pinky-yellow. I picked this technique up from Vallejo, who has some wonderful colour transitions in his skintones, and gives them a more life-like feel. The exception to this is her face, which I’ve left more highlighted, to draw attention to it.
Step 2:
A development of the previous step, I’ve worked in more tight detail around the breast area, simply because I prefer to get some idea of how the whole thing would look. Until recently, I did whole paintings like this, detail by detail, but this can lead to errors that are costly to fix at later stages (and impossible to fix if you’re working traditonally). It’s a better workflow, in my opinion to block out things first and get into tighter details later on, but I inevitably work into detail in one small area, be it the face, or body, or even a background element. This gives me the motivation to keep on with the piece.
I’ve added some lightning in the background to put the storm idea across more bluntly and faded her hair off more. At this point, the only reference I’m using is the Hong Ly picture.
Step 3:
Woah, sudden change! This is what looking up references can do for an image!
I decided to look up some storm clouds references, and came to the conclusion that my colour scheme was not going to be very convincing, and was too purpley-pink. So I found a great image that had these colours in it, but was of a close crop of clouds, so not much good for reference.
I should explain that first I tried to ‘composite’ the clouds by copying quite closely from about three different cloud images, one for each plane - foreground, middle and background. This not only turned out to be very difficult, but was not giving the image a sense of wholeness, and they looked disjointed. So a scrapped the whole file, looked through loads of cloud pictures of all kinds, then closed every reference I had and painted from my minds eye, based on what I’d absorbed. I also switched to Painter for the clouds, as it’s blending is far better and less taxing on memory and graphics cards that using PS’s blender. This isn’t necessarily right for everyone, but above is how it came out, and it was a better beginning to what I’d had previously! I take things like the eye level and perspective of the woman into account, using her as a focal point for everything else I put in. I’m constantly zooming in and out, or I have another window open which updates the picture as I’m working on it, so I can see how the details are fitting into the whole piece.
I work on the figure a little more, as all I’ve done is fiddle with the hue and saturation to get her to fit with the new colour scheme, which has left me with some funky shadow colours, which I work over very quickly. I put a little more detail into the face, as at this point, it’s going to be the focus of the picture, and I give her a reason to have her arm outstretched, namely some forks of lightning, using a contrasting blue to all the warm oranges. Notice too how there are hints of the blue up her arm - I’d intended to have the lightning as her veins, hidden under the skin. I like a challenge, if nothing else!
