Victorian girl

[Mathias]

@Ryu, yep we're very different. But we could learn a lot from each other.

@'stachio, thanks, now my victorian girl is a victorian lady-of-the-night, eagerly waiting on the street corner. Is thart it?!







Hair almost done. Feather thingy still untouched.

This hair got away from me. Got all pragmatic with it's rendering. Too contrasty and defined. Looking for a way to fix it . . .

[pistachio]

yoip

I was never really good at capturing likenesses anyway. Wish I was though.

Now your girl's hair is starting to look like plastic (or at least with a ton of hairspray on it), a bit like what you'd see on some manga-character with really huge hair. Perhaps make the shading a little less contrasty? Less opaque, maybe, letting more of the original 'shopped hair shine through?

It also has a bit of the zoomed-in lighting problem. I wouldn't be sure how to fix that though.

@blu: Let me be a little more defined... I mean, the hair is defined by just locks, and I'm starting to miss the granularity that immediately suggested individual strands. Now those strands look a bit unnaturally thick, almost as thick as yarn. Of course, it doesn't look like yarn. It's just thick. In the filtered version, though, that was still there. I guess it's the shading. Gah, I'm confused...

[blumunkee]

Hmm, actually, most women would want their hair to stand out like that.

You might lighten up the black levels of the hair a bit, or turn up the blacks elsewhere. The blacks don't get that dark anywhere else.

[Atnas]

This has come a LONG way.  But something still bugs me about the face. I think it has something to do with the lips, but right now the most immediate critique I have for it is that the eyes are too far apart. Usually the corners of the mouth should come to the middle of the eye, in the painting the corners of the mouth come to the corners of the eye.



I believe they just extend to the sides of the head a bit too much, though the eyeshadow makes things a bit indeterminate.

[Mathias]

Yeah, the hair really bugs me, but I'm afraid I'm committed now. Simply spent too much time on it. Next time I do hair, I'll take a different approach.



Random tweaks. New Bob Ross bg.



Her face has gotten uglier. Atnas, you make me want to re-visit her facial features. Oy . . .

[st0ven]

Mathias:

I like the new sense of lighting as well as the adjustment down in saturation and some additional warmth into the lighting. I think theres one last thing thats really bugging me about this piece now.

You have this very elegant, elaborate rendering of a female holding a flower. She is sharp and crisp in her detail. Then you have her pinned up ontop of a very loosely painted background with not very much going on in terms of subject matter. The fact that the girl is rendered so well and so complete makes the piece now look unfinished.

Also, as your background advances further into the foreground, you have a complete absence of lighting, but then the female figure in the foreground implies she is rather well lit. It almost looks as if there is some professional lighting crew on stage in the foreground there haha. So again that further separates the woman from the environment that you're portraying her in.

lastly i think some of the darker edges near the top of your implied mountains are way too dark, and perhaps a little too loosely formed. Loose is good but theyre looking almost as if they were painted at a lower resolution than the rest of the image, even when compared to your trees.

I actually think your hair treatment looks rather nice in this latest revision. Still looks slightly overdone but the really fine detail in the rest of her features makes it feel like it fits better

Colors feel very solid to me now, i prefer this version the most so far out of all your iterations. now just get some of that foreground area blocked in and perhaps make some of that detail sharper as it approaches the foreground.

thats all i have to comment about it at this point.

[Mathias]

Thanks for the continuing guidance, matey!

I know just what you mean about the separation of foreground and background, due to the apparently different lighting set-ups. Starting out with this image I knew I wanted something a little different than just a typical painted portrait. Something realistic but that "winks" at fantasy. By fantasy, I mean a fantasy type of presentation or aesthetic. Somethin' a little ethereal maybe. But if the attempt only ends up with the viewer perceiving the scene not as fantasy-ish but just having bad lighting instead, well I guess I wasn't exactly successful hehe.



Aw crap, the bg's roughness bugs you that much? Darn. Well you're right, I would like for it to be more refined, too.



-Left side has been worked on. If I brought the right side up to par with the left would you think it sufficient, then?

-Darkened hair. So much contrasy highlights. Almost didn't look like black hair. I still wish it was simpler, but it's high-time to put a bullet in this.

-Not sure what to do with the closest bit of the bg. I like the effect of her being isolated in the foreground all alone but it kinda looks like she's standing in a huge body of murky water. The ambiguity is nice in that it allows her to have focus, but is it too ambiguous/abstracty?

[blumunkee]

Whuh... Obviously you can do a painterly style.

I like the fog, but it needs to be toned down. It looks like there are headlights behind her right now.

In the mountain detail, the rightmost mountain feels off balance. Like it's leaning to the side.

I agree about the face. It needs more referenced aspects. Too many shapes and forms are made up. Also, the neck still looks flat. Chins don't cast so dark a shadow.

[juuska]

Thing that pops out most is IMO the positioning of her hands. They ain't looking very natural right now...
E: I know we are wrestling in very different class, but I like if I could be any help

[Mathias]

Yer right, blu. It does look like a car is about to nail her.

Oy, the hands, really? I want to try to implement st0ven's edit for the arms at least.



Facial fix? full res




At least she's prettier than the last female close-up I did.