Half Her Heart's Duet - Part 2

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Creating a Color Palette (Part 2)




References

When you’re doing something highly realistic or detailed, photo references can be a blessing if used properly. First, whenever possible (and it isn’t always), you should take them yourself. That way YOU are in control of the quality, lighting, and (if a figure is involved) the pose. It’s also easy to let a photo make color, texture, light and detail choices for you, but remember that you should ultimately decide what works best for the piece. Try to treat the photo as a guideline rather than a rigid structure. For Half Her Heart’s Duet I used 4 original photos for different pieces of the scene; One for the general shape of the clouds, two for the hands and arms, and one for the shape of the dress and feet (the actual fabric was matte and pink). Other parts, such as the hair, torso, instrument, and background were done from imagination, and I used actual notebook scraps strewn around my studio for the curling shape of the paper. I prefer to keep my photo references open beside my canvas and paint by sight, as if they were real life subjects.

The Face

Achieving an expressive face was crucial in making this piece work, so of any single element, I probably reworked the face the most. I considered several things based on the girl’s perceived personality. I used red hair and fair skin pulling from the rural American “farm girl” archetype. I gave her a strong jaw to show her strength, and a reddish nose to suggest that she may have recently been crying. To paint the face, I started with a hard round brush to add detail to my basic forms. Considering the light source coming from above/right, I kept the brightest highlights on the forehead and cheekbone. On a separate Overlay Layer I lightly painted warmer reds and purples over the far side of her face to darken the shadows once I was satisfied with the form.

The Fabric

Creating the dress textures was one of the most challenging, yet rewarding parts of making Half Her Heart’s Duet. As mentioned earlier, I used a photo for reference, so using it as a guideline I created the major shapes with a hard round brush.

Next, I carefully assessed which wrinkles and folds were most important— the photographed dress was extremely wrinkled from storage and pleated in a way that made it too busy to look at compared to the other elements in the piece. Once I decided which areas were important to reproduce, I used some chunky brushes like the ones shown at the right on High Opacity, but with the Flow Jitter set to change with variable Pen Pressure so I could control the opacity manually. Fabric bends light in such a way that you constantly need to use softer and lighter pressure to imitate sweeping curves. It also helped to have the brush set to control width manually based on pen pressure, since shaded and highlighted areas tend to disappear into points.

When working with color in the white areas, I used colors sampled from all over the picture. White is never really white. It soaks up all the colors around it and has extremely highly-saturated reflective qualities. So directly underneath the gold overdress I chose to use brighter oranges as if the white fabric was a mirror capturing what was on the reverse side of the gold fabric. I used a similar concept with the gold fabric when I decided to make it reflective— closer to the ground I dulled the yellows into greens and greys as if they were reflecting the ground itself. The other trick to reflective fabric is increasing the contrast between the highlights and shadows. I used the Dodge Tool sparingly on several of the lighter areas to help boost the contrast.