Another Illustration Friday prompt. This one took me over two weeks to complete and it's only half of what I was aiming for. Granted, I did lose quite a few days on the Guild Wars 2 beta weekend, but I still think I was unreasonably slow on this. I'm still learning a lot about the software, so I guess that's understandable. It's still frustrating, though.
This piece took a few days just to come up with an idea I liked, and it only came about after talking over the ideas with a friend and then having my eyes randomly land on my shoes sitting on the floor. I wanted a solution to the idea of heights without going for something terribly obvious, and really high high-heeled shoes seemed like a fun way to address the idea. I also got to look up lots of shoe porn for reference photos. The shoes I did settle on weren't quite high enough for my tastes, so I added a few inches. I originally intended to have a pair of shoes, but the second shoe had such odd reflections of color and was so fuzzy, I just scrapped it out of frustration. I should've spent longer on the skin, but I was eager to be done with this project and the skin was the last step, so there you go. I also had no idea what to do with the background, but that's par for the course.
I did learn a lot, though. After trying to erase around the shoe and make a perfect shoe shape, I found that using the paths tool was really what I needed, since it could give me perfect lines and curves, which is really necessary for something man-made like a high-heel shoe. I also used the paths tool on the leg, but I don't think it was quite as necessary. Maybe it saved me some time, I don't know. I also learned that a gaussian blur can really come in handy (i.e. the heel of the shoe). And I finally figured out that changing your brush is a good thing. For the longest time I've been frustrated by using the brush on anything lower than 100% opacity, because you'd get this annoying layering effect if you went over something after lifting up your brush. So I finally experimented with the fuzzy-edged brush and found the solution to this stupid, stupid problem. I still wanted a hard edge for the highlights on the upper part of the shoe, so I had to use the hard-edged brush and do every layer perfectly in one stroke. I'm not sure what the solution for that is, or how to even ask the question to find out the answer. All I can think of is using white on different levels of opacity, coloring them over the base color, saving that image as it's own file, and then pulling colors from that new image and coloring with them at 100% opacity (which is what I did with my last piece). That seems like an overly complicated and unnecessary process, so I can only assume I'm just really stupid when it comes to digital painting. But I already knew that. HA!
Digital painting.
