Indian kid: Part II

I'll just cut the meaningless chit chat and head right on to my last week's project. If you're not familiar with it, feel free to go back to the post right here -> http://whereisyour-mind.blogspot.fi/2014/02/an-indians-child.html

To rewind to the last post and get you up to speed, I'll just put the picture that I was left off with on the Painter. This is what I was left off with last Sunday working on the Indian Kid.

As you see, It's really in the middle of everything. I still have the feathers and the fur to touch up and add texture and detail to the entire image. Just to remind you, I'm not drawing off a picture, you know, as many people do with the whole digital art world. I've got another screen right next to me with the rough idea of what I am drawing; I just need that for reference to the Indian Headdress since I'm not too familiar with the looks of them in detail. After this, I'm still going to head on with the Digital Airbrush, but what I will change is the opacity and the size of my 'brush'. To add detail to the fur on top of the feathers, I begin by sizing down the brush to about 1.5 and setting the opacity of the brush to about 20-30%, depending on what shade I'm using. 

As I'm working on this picture, I've been mulling around whether I should add color to the image and I'm still yet to make a decision. What I was ultimately planning though was to add some color to a particular area in order to grab the attention of the observer, but I haven't decided what I want my focal point to be so I haven't headed onto add any color anywhere yet. Maybe I will do that as a final touch, perhaps make the star on the headdress shine, ensuring that it captivates the observer. 

I've actually had quite the hectic weekend and I haven't gotten much time until today afternoon to work on the Indian Kid. I guess it really does take me forever to finish anything! 

Anyway, I began working on the feathers and the fur (if you can notice from the picture above) around the kid's head and I discovered that it was actually a lot harder and more time consuming than I had thought. I sized down my brush even further to about 1.3 and pushed my opacity up to about 29%  in order to lift out the thin hairs that are being blown by the wind on the feathers. You can see this progress the best on the feather on the far left. Now, if we go ahead and compare the picture above and the picture I was left off last Sunday, you can see the added detail on the feathers, the don't look as 'sprayed' as they did previously. Additionally, I started adding detail on the face of the kid, by adding eyelashes and improving on my shadings and enhanced the lines above the eye. 

However, despite all my hard work, this is what I am left with now and I guess you can hardly see the progress I made but oh well! Maybe next time, I'm hoping to add some color by then.. 

From this you can see - at least I hope you can see - that I have tightened up my line work and added some more contrast to the feathers, especially the one in between the two spotted feathers, in order to make them distinct from each other. I do think you can see that now the fur looks more 'furry' than in the previous pictures and they float nicely around the child's face. I've also pretty much just added contrast everywhere around the picture - well, around the face - which helps me to envision the final work and begin working on the feathers above child's head. I am not looking forward to tackling that one..

Unfortunately, my trial round of Painter X3 is running out and I'm yet to order the real copy since it's very difficult to get one of those home/student versions here in Finland and the commercial copy costs around 400 euros which is quite a lot for my student budget. However, I have a few tricks up my sleeve to get that Painter and for the time being, I am going to download another trial version next week probably of Photoshop and get myself used to that until I get my Painter running. I'm a bit skeptical about Photoshop since I'm not a real photo editing enthusiast, I like to keep my pictures real without too much false 'beauty' put into them. I we will find out next week how it works out..

My apologies, this post is going to be a bit shorter than the usual since I've only been working on the fur and feathers this week and I've been too swamped to draw anything in my sketchbooks during school times (you know, during skips..). Next week I hope to at least get this done and begin on something new and exciting with the Photoshop.