Bearing Gifts

So I clearly lied about getting the November sketching up ASAP. In fact this post isn't about the November sketching either; I still have to scan it in in fact (It's only 6 pages or so - I'm hoping to get it scanned tonight). In the mean time you get to see the only other thing I did in November, but first a little background.
I finally joined Deviant Art, which I had always assumed was, well, y'know, for deviants? Well, turns out that's not it at all (though some of the stuff on there is a little twisted), and it's full of artists of all types sharing their work. One thing that happens a lot is that people share "stock", which is stuff you can use for free as reference or whatever. So this is based on Stock, and you can see that original, by AimeeStock, here.

So it's not as good as I was hoping when I saw the original stock image, but there are bits of it I'm really pleased with, and other bits that I think are fairly terrible. Her face doesn't look right, and I think it's far more lopsided than Aimee's actual face. Despite this it took an age to paint. Pretty much the whole of November was spent on it, and in terms of hours I wasn't keeping track, but I saved a new file every hour on average and I have 27 files saved so make of that what you will.

Since it took so long I'll be presenting more step by step images than perhaps I normally would, and I'll also include the traditional step by step animated gif later on. The image above is expandable if you click on it by the way, the rest of the images are not (even the expanded version is only 50% of the size I painted it, but it's more than big enough for most purposes).

Step 1: Pencils

I spent a lot longer working on this stage than I usually do. I'd already decided that I wasn't going to rush the piece and that I should spend a fair amount of time on this step so as not to fall into the trap I have on so many images before, where I have to fix things as I go along. That didn't really work out, and as I've mentioned I'm not really happy with the finished piece. This isn't a real pencil sketch by the way, but one done digitally in Art Rage. Other than being a bit cleaner than a real pencil sketch it's surprisingly convincing I think.

Step 2: The First Mistake

This isn't actually the mistake, this is what I came up with in frustration at actually making the mistake. I had started with far to light a colour, and it was making the contrast difficult to manage, so I abandoned it and took a (simulated) palette knife to it. I quite liked the effect of that actually, but it wasn't what I was aiming for with this piece. In retrospect I think the lighter paint might have worked out better in the long run. Live and learn, as usual.  I told another porky pie by the way, you can expand this image ever so slightly - though why you'd want to is anyones guess.

Step 3: Roughing out the Flesh

I think that heading sounds vaguely dirty personally, but it's exactly what this step entailed.  You can see I've started adding detail to her eye already, and this is something I continue into the next step, getting the first pass at her face done.  In this step she looks like a bulldog chewing a thistle, but it is extremely rough as I hope you can appreciate.

Step 4: The Face

First pass at her face as I said.  While I should have been trying to rough out the rest of the image at this time I felt that I should at least see if I could get her face to a presentable place before continuing (especially after the first failure).  This was close enough, and infact I don't think it really ever got much better than this throughout the process, just different.

Step 5: Starting the Cloth

Here I've added the basic outline of the cloth, and you can also see the ears and base of her hair have been done.  The lines are visible again.  The lines were always there, but I turned them off when I was actually painting quite often, only using them as a guide on occasion outside of painting her face.

My initial plan was to paint everything on one layer, but it was at this stage I discovered that Artgage's latest version had a bug (which I still need to report), making it extremely difficult to paint complimentary colours on the same layer if they're thin.  I painted the cloth on a new player as a result.

Step 6:  Continuing Work

Not much to to say here.  I've made a first pass on her arms and started on the cloth.  Her hands are one of the things I'm most pleased about with the finished image, and you can see one of them is almost complete at this point.

Step 7: Roughing the Background

Here I've come much further on the cloth and repainted quite a bit of her face (it will be much more apparent in the animated gif I suspect).  I decided I needed to make a start on the background.  Originally I was going to copy the draped cloth from the photograph, but here I decided half way through painting it that a mountain might work better visually.  I decided to keep the composition though as I felt it worked well.

Step 8: The Home Stretch

Almost finished at this point.  It's really just a logical continuation from the last image.  After this I add jewelry (and I'm not happy by how her headband came out, but I'm fairly pleased with the necklace and earrings), complete the cloth and hair and take one final pass at her face before calling it quits, signing it and cropping it.

Here's the animated gif as promised.  Each image is about an hour further along than the previous one as stated above (each image representing a fresh save file).  It's quite large, so hopefully it will load in a reasonable timeframe ;)