Satisfied with the colours for now, I painted the rest of the hair, using the same techniques. I tried to vary the colours enough so that you could never say if part of the painting was entirely blue or purple or orange - it kept shifting. Colours by themselves are not beautiful - the relationship between two colours next to each other is what looks good. The abstract style of this painting allowed me to use whatever colours I wished, resulting in some interesting colour relationships. I only painted the girl’s face a little, because I liked the existing texture. I brightened the whole picture with an adjustment layer, and added a rosy-brown gradient set to hard light to ‘excite’ the colours further. Lastly, I also decided to crop off the bottom of the picture, neatly solving the problem of how to depict her shoulder.
Background experiments :
I felt that the girl’s head needed to contrast more with the background. I experimented with using gold and a dark blue texture. One of the luxuries of digital art is being able to see these different paths your piece of art can take. I always try shifting colours and different texture overlays to see if I can find a more interesting look. In the end I adjusted the gold until the background looked like a dark, rosy grey.
Fish!
Something was missing in this picture... something bright and small above her head. If this were a poster or book cover, the title would do nicely, but unfortunately I had to do with a fish. I drew it on the same kind of paper using some minnow photos for reference, scanned it and added it in on a separate layer. To accommodate the fish I had to extend the canvas upwards - using a combination of the clone brush and new regular brushwork. (foggy) I added an adjustment layer to correct the levels, adjusted the cropping and the picture was ‘finished’. In truth I’ve actually tweaked it several times since then, due to feedback from fellow artists and also because I saw small things I could fix.
Although the final image isn’t as blue as I had hoped, I couldn’t think of a better name.
