Victorian girl

[Mathias]

WHAWT, 'stachio!? Whar's my nutcracker . . .




Helllooooooooooooooooooo0, st0ven!

Another unexpected edit bombshell! A hundred gratitudes, friend!

You guys don't know how helpful and enlightening these superior edits are. Or . . . maybe you do, hehe. Both you guys created such a nice female face, so thankful for that. I needed her to have exceptional beauty; a trait of the actual char depicted.

I try hard to soak in and discern the reasoning behind each creative decision reflected in the edits, in this thread. And I think I understand them very well. It's just that that doesn't do a whole lot to bridge the gap in skills  -    mine  <  YOURS
But learning is occurring. That's all I can ask for. A lot of learning during this project actually.

Love those cloth folds, st0venius. And yeah, I do love how Chris created nice flowing implied lines with his drapery, that aid in keeping the focus. I have a great fondness for design principles, and they're importance, but often, out of being overwhelmed I'll either forget or disregard them. Goal of course is to make them second nature; you don't even think you just do them.

Nice right arm (our left) edit. My hands look a little awkward and you fixed them without even editing the hands themselves! Checked my ref for the hands, turns out I deviated from how the wrist is positioned, your edit is way more like the ref, and you haven't even seen it . . . yeesh.
 
Love how your edit takes a different stylistic path than Chris's. Yours gives off more of a playful clay-modeled illustrationy vibe with it's chisely facial features and cloth folds, which is actually more the route I originally wanted to go, since the book is to be a detective story, aimed at teens. Like Nancy Drew type stuff. Yes, I'm drawing the story's detective heroine.



Well, anyway   GO UPDATE:   (+ official st0ven-mandated luminosity map)

   

-Hair still ultra WIP (can't hold off any longer on it! dreading . . .)

-BG modified searching for a good bg color scheme, etc. Will be totally replaced.

-Outer glowy edge halo makes it look too moon-lit, wanted more of a dawn look.

-Too voluptuous? Trying to be modest here . . .

-Everything a bit dark.

-Too blue and midnighty. Luckily it's a series of layers creating the coloring/lighting in this version . . . surprise.







(time to put a bullet in this thing . . . today, hopefully . . .)

[st0ven]

Mathias: I think this is looking much more cohesive, and your forms and volumes have much more weight to them now. Your purple/blue treatment seems to work pretty well i think, perhaps a little chiche'ish for a novel cover but i think that will appeal to a lot of people who see it (lots of eyes will respond to the nice vibrant cool hues there).

Wow whatever you did with your fur rendering it looks spot on fantastic! The shading underneath the flower actually winds up making the breast shape look more round, some cast shadows on the outer sides of the breast should help make them even rounder if you choose to want that look. I can actually make out exactly whats going on with the head piece now (it makes perfect sense to me now as opposed to before). Your lace work is also fantastic, adds a lot of elegance to her that shed otherwise be lacking. Lots of great additions in the latest piece for sure. very appealing to the eye i think.

Some things that would immediately jump out at me looking at it from a critique perspective, first and foremost has to be the neck. Its looking very flat, as theres no rounding happening near the right side of the neck. it just goes from dark to light very linearly, ignoring the cylindrical nature of the neck's shape. Where you are going light near that edge i actually think you should be going back to dark.

Also her arm volume is looking a little anemic near her wrists, it appears that her arms could stand for a little thickening on the underside (the top sides of the arms are just fine). This should help you with that wrist 'issue' on her right hand that it sounds like you were speaking of. A little bit more volume under her right pinky would also help to complete that fix. without that it looks just a tad like her arms were cut out from another source but you werent able to select all of it (perhaps cropped off the very bottom portion of her arms)

Im not a huge fan of the outer glow effect you have on her. it appears to just be flattening her out, making her look like a cutout ontop of a background (except how the edges of the fur are illuminated, thats spot on!). the whites around the feathers are making it look like it was a photoshop crop job or something.

The lower skirt is looking a tad 'pillowy' in your current rendering. what brush settings are you using for this?

As for the hair - yeah hair isnt easy and certainly not fun if youre stuck. I just try to use larger brush strokes to get the overall highlights and shadows in, then use continuously smaller brushes to illustrate more individual bands of hair, then smaller still to imply some individual strands where there are highlights. If you go too small too fast with your brush selection usually it can help kill the illusion in a hurry from my experience.

looking good my man.

[Mathias]

Yeah, I'm going for the typical eye-candy, dangerously close to the edge of over-developed, impact effect here for sure.

Found some cool fur coats on google and mimicked the texture. New fur is more dainty, less like coarse bear fur now, more like mink. Fitting I thought.

Good eye on the neck, thanks!

I'll try and work on the arms.

The glow is due for an overhaul.

Skirt sucks, but most will be cropped out for book cover I think. I used normal brushes but spent a lot of time smoothing. Used levels and curves adjustments and other stuff, too.



The hair should come out ok, due to my unscrupulous photoshop practices. I smell a direct paint-over coming on haha

[Mathias]

I do a ton of extreme sort of photomanipulation, I guess you'd say it's my strong suit in the digital realm.

But, here's what you can do with a decent photo ref - chop it apart into the right pieces and reassemble it in layers.


The scalped composite photograph hair, with all my colors and effects applied to the scene. Already looks like it belongs doesn't it? :



Now to simply paint over the top of it.
Not exactly purist, haha. But I'm in a hurry and I like how well structured Swift's curls are in the photograph.
I tried for a minute to draw some curls from scratch. . . and yeah. No.

[st0ven]

IMO you should at least be using some brushwork to burn in some proper volumetric shading so that the hair doesnt look like a collage of photomanipulated hair. While i agree the color treatment you put on it is very convincing, the lighting on the hair strands as a whole do not feel consistent with the rest of the image. Out of curiosity is this also something youve done with the peacock feathers they have that same stand-out visual effect, as if its granularity doesnt quite belong with the rest of the painting's detail.

 Your method can be a huge time saver and im sure there are plenty of industry concept artists that make heavy use of this very technique, but without giving it some of your own brush gestures it doesnt quite integrate well with the rest of the image.

it does appear very well composed though

[Helm]

st0ven captures exactly what I was trying to say with 'granularity of x element doesn't belong with the rest of the painting's detail'. But we've gone over this already. More and more what you're painting looks like what I'd use as the final composite base and completely repaint over it in a more painterly style. However the progress from the first images to what you've got going now is amazing. Will this be our first non-pixel treasure chest feature?

[Mathias]

I couldn't agree more, fellas. The new photo hair is just for a paint-over. When done, it'll match the rest of the brushing . . . I hope. Yep ste0v, the hat is also a horribly twisted/modified photographic element. Will get refined big-time, along with the hair.

Actually still tweaking the hair volumes. It's all too bulbous and weird looking. It's all pretty improvised.

But yeah, granularity is a good term for it I suppose. I've been using 'detail resolution' - the density of detail. Above, the hair is high detail, since it's photo, while the adjacent face and cloak is rather low. That's bad. In the end it all has to come together. Which it will.
Helm, a composite base to just paint over?! hehe  oy. We'll see what we end up with here . . . hopefully, tomorrow.


I don't like having to use too many paint-over elements, but the hair is certainly one now. Adding to my crimes, before I paint over it I'm going to filter it, in order to knock down detail and get a jump-start on a painterly look.

Like dis:



The filter alone rectifies much of the granularity issue. But is just a start.


Yeah, feature chest may be nice if this thread's useful for others.
Had I known it beforehand, I would've tried to make this more educational and explanatory, as far as processes, techniques, etc.
Hah, this thread's kind of embarrassing though - look at the face in the OP, before Puppet and Ryu straightened me out hehe.
It is pretty lengthy, full of pics, and contains a nice community effort, so it's pretty entertaining at least.

[Helm]

Never too late to make it more educational on your end if you want. And yes, this thread is a pure highlight for Pixelation, imo. Surprising that it's not about a pixel art piece, heh!

[Ryumaru]

Mathias: Your image has come such a long way, I'm glad I could have been of any help- and as you develop it we easily see how different we are. See, I paint traditionally all day, and when I go digital, I just do the same things. If you asked me to render the way you have in digital ( or in traditional, really) I'd say… fuck that. Many audiences love that fidelity of detail and it's something I struggle with. When you're loose like me you ( most of the times) have a better understanding of a whole so the image is more successful, but if you have control over both the whole and the details that will put you in a league far higher than me currently.
As far as the hair goes, the filter is nice, but you could bring some points sharper when you go in and render it. Also it needs to cast shadows on the cloth below of course.

St0ven: I'm getting… better at digital. Still no where near a professional level like you are at. :] Honestly the edit was quite easy with the reference and the base that mathias had.

[pistachio]

I'm going to agree with everyone else, 'tis come a long way since you started. Unfortunately I don't have much critique, the image is already looking great--the level of detail is amazing--and I'd have to be some sort of art demigod better than I am now to spot any errors that haven't been spotted by someone else already. Well, maybe the neck. It's kinda flat. The area below the lips looks cut off too but I guess it's her chin.

But I do have this to make up for it:



Which I'm not sure is allowed here. But I hope you like it anyway. I guess it's an apology for the apparently not subtle statement I made last time.