Making Of the "Golden Panda" by Kirsi Salonen

In this phase a lot of things happened with the lights, details and mood. Here I added another photograph to the background and put a green layer on it so it would reflect like a flush rainforest behind them. Then I used Painter's smeary palette knives on the panda's fur with a brush size of no more than 3 to 5 px. Still in Painter I used Smudge and Blender with very tender pressure to make the skin smooth and “fleshy.” After this I switched back to Photoshop where I made the final touches.

To create the nice light I added a new layer on top of the whole picture and adjusted the highlights and shades with the color of the lights. The direction where light is coming from should look clear. The head and blond hair have the most highlighted areas so they also appear clear and bright. It is very important to keep the shady parts visible so the image doesn't get too dark. The colors of the shadows depends the volume of the light and the surface that they are reflected from. Skin is like a brilliant rainbow of colors but they are so softly blended together so it's hard to get a clear idea of the exact tones. I only use tones that are more brown, green, purple and yellow. These colors should also be very muted and mixed.
After you figure out how the colors blend together as layers then the right tones of light and shadow are much easier to figure out. You just have to practice as I do and will be still for many years to come. The same process goes for the panda's coloring. Do you see how bright the head is this picture? Although it is in bright light there is also a lot of hair in the darker color that is visible. The boy's sharp hairs are also made with the freeform pen-tool with brush sizes from 8-12 px in the screen mode and a rather light pressure.