Making of Qiane

“Making of Qiane ” by Shreya Shetty
I usually start with the head because it’s the defining area for the character and I find it the most exciting to paint.For portraits/skin tones, I do follow a general pattern, but I improvise and adapt it to the image.I start added darker masses around the eye sockets, under the nose and below the lips, once the light source is defined. I generally divide the face into 3 colour areas- the forehead is yellowish, the cheeks/nose are redder and the chin is usually blue/green (well not so much for females, but it’s a just a guideline) Then depending on the look I add blues/purples around the eye, dark reds for the shadows in nostril area and such. The shadow areas of the face are usually the same as the background colour, maybe a little more saturated in the “penumbra region”(which is the lighter part of the shadow) where there is bounce from the environment. I think what really makes or breaks the feel of skin (as for everything else) are the highlights. If I go for a cyan light source, I add some yellow around it. Most of the subtle hues are added with a light hand in the soft light mode.

I continue refining areas of the face.One excellent habit to cultivate while painting is to regularly flip your canvas horizontally while you are painting. This helps your eye to spot the mistakes that you get immune to when you start at it for too long.Another trick to not over/underdetail parts is to open up another window of the same file( In Photoshop CS2, Window-.jpg>Arrange-.jpg>New Window) , keep one zoomed out and one zoomed in while you are painting. This will help you to see the overall picture while working so you don’t get lost in insignificant details.
Save your file often! Once you’re happy with a certain level, save it and close the file. Then reopen and start working. This way, if you make a lot of changes while painting and suddenly decide to go back to how a certain part looked earlier, you can use your history brush there to restore that area.

Once the head is in a decent shape, I shift my attention to the folds of her dress. Painting is a bit like sculpting, dark areas recede and light areas project. Keeping this in mind I paint the folds while following the general form of her body at all times so that the cloth doesn’t look ‘pasted-into’. I also start paying more attention to the background at this stage.
It’s important to keep analysing your reference as you paint. If you do not understand the material properties of the objects that you paint, you’ll never be able to paint them convincingly enough. Keep asking yourself, why is this so shiny? Where is that green coming in from? What’s making that skin look rich and healthly? The more you observe and analyse the more you train your eye. This is probably one of the hardest things to learn, so start practising!

Here I shifted my focus to her dress and started refining the folds a bit more. It’s important to keep in mind that the flow of the fabric must correspond to the form of the figure underneath.

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