Saturday, June 9, 2012

Sketch: Redhead

Something a little bit cartoon-y, and an exercise in coloring and shading with different techniques in Photoshop.

The initial sketch was loosely based on Laura Marling, whom I absolutely adore. However, I made her a redhead, simply because I think redheads are cute and I felt like drawing one.

The initial sketch:


I simply took a picture of the sketch with my Samsung Galaxy S2 because the sketch was only going to serve as a reference layer so there really was no need to do a proper scan.

Instead of drawing a traditional outline of the face, I drew the background as the top layer in black to avoid having an actual outline stroke:


Next, I added a bit of a lighting effect...


The next step are really several steps, however, I got lost in the moment and forgot to save further individual steps. So here is the result of the next steps where I drew facial features and added some colour!


Next I sorted out shading with gradients, and finally got rid of that initial pencil sketch layer...


To finish things off, I played with different colours and gradients for the black background and ended up with soft shades of green, which I thought went well with her red hair... I also made a slight change to the shading on the neck. Et voilĂ !



I am fairly happy with the result, I achieved the clean look I was going for and the lack of black outlines is a bit unusual. Not groundbreaking perhaps, but it was a nice exercise!

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