So this one was fun. I also went about it completely different to how I usually do. As a starting point I wanted to do something somewhat inspired by Klimt, I just wanted gold and jewel colours, I didn't even have a pose at first; which I almost always normally start with.
So I had a look at the sort of patterns Klimt used (a lot of triangles and rectangles) and hunted for a pose that looked a bit Art Nouveau. I ended up using Divine Sword by Liancary-art. Didn't even really mean for her to have wings...just sort of happened when I wanted to break up the space behind her a bit.
It was so different for me to have what patterns I wanted to use as a starting point instead of the actual character. In a way I feel the character is the weakest point, she's really not that different from the original stock photo. I just made her slightly more warrior like, I wanted her to feel like a warrior queen who wouldn't normally be dressed up like this, giving her a dragon tooth crown helped add to this a bit (somewhat inspired by the jagged crown? from Skyrim.)
A small mistake I made right at the start was forgetting the stock photo had the sword sheathed, therefor the sword blade was actually smaller than it looked....ended up with a blade way to wide for its grip. I did manage to fix/hide this a bit later though.
Next came all the tests for the patterns and again these were fun. The flat golds was all Finetec coliro pearlcolours, did a review here for them. For the rased lines I used Pebeo's Cerne relief outliners, the transparent and king gold.
In the top right you can see the test I did for the base of her dress...and as much as I liked the test this really did not fit with the rest of the painting at all. By it's self it was beautiful, but it ended up being the weakest part of the painting by far.
The arch above her was a little more complicated than most of the other patterns. After the first layer of watercolour went down I added the gold outliner, let it dry and then put down the transparent outliner in spirals. After the transparent outliner dried I added the gold watercolour on top of the red, the red still visable under the transparent outliner.
I ended up working out her wings digitally, I knew I wanted them in gold, red and purple but it would be slower to work out how to spread out the colours using pencil.
I still wanted the gold to have a bit of purple to it so first I laid down a darker shade of purple ( the transparent outliner actually lightens what's underneath it slightly) before putting the gold over it. I also had transparent outlines on the red rectangles just to break up the shapes a little.
Here you can see the full range of golds a little better, including where I added in the gold on her wings.
The lighter area behind her head was made up out of the Finetec watercolours: Moon gold, Arabic gold, and Inca gold. With a bit of transparent outliner on top in squares.
I ended up darkening her dress once I realised how badly it fitted with the rest, went with a graphic stark contrast to the shadows.
Doing the skin wasn't nearly as interesting. there was something so satisfying about just blocking out flat colours and then adding a bit of outliner over them. I think I'll add this to the types of backgrounds I do in the future...It's simple, it's fun and it's quick....and it doesn't look like I just rushed the background.
I ended up doing my signature in the outliner, it was a little messy but felt nice.
Now...due to lockdown it was actually 5 months between when I started this and finished it....and for the whole time I had Scotch magic tape over the white space to keep it clean...and yeh, don't do that. Scotch tape is fine on paper for a while but after 5 months when I lifted it up, even with using a hairdryer it still pulled the fibres of the paper up and ripped it...not all the way through but enough to be visible.
I've damaged my paintings so many times with tape or masking fluid so I hunted for ages to find something to help fix/hide it.
...And then on one random forum some random guy just said I take the back of a dessert spoon to it.
And it works, it doesn't fix everything but it does hide a lot of the more mild damage. You can find my exact tests here.
So. Next problem. Scanners are terrible at picking up on gold.
Now there is a method involving overlaying pictures of your art over the scan and only showing the gold bits, Stephanie Law did a tutorial somewhere, and I have used that method in the past but there were a few problems this time around.
My camera's resolution is so much lower than my scanners, which would make the gold look blurry in comparison to everything else.
There's so much gold on this one it would be a nightmare to take a photo at the exact right distance to get it all lined up right, especially with my camera's slight fisheye.
So what I ended up doing is creating a layer mask in Photoshop for all the gold and this took ages doing by hand, because the gold reflected bits of the other colours around it making the colour select tool also pick up other things. Tempted to use the layer mask for something else it took so long.
Then I made gradient maps for each of the golds in my painting. I picked the colours off a photo of the golds on a sunny day, so they might be a little warm. If anyone wants to use these to get a digital version of the golds for Finetec Coliro pearlcolours go ahead.
Then I just played with the contrast/saturation a bit till I had a shine spot in the middle like you would with a camera.
I'm going to reuse this method. It's a good way of getting the same high quality resolution as the scan whist avoiding your gold being the manky brown the scanner gives.
There's something really nice about just switching mediums. And in this case it worked really well to push past artist block. The pose, the idea and colours behind this one aren't that interesting but being able to explore a new medium/technique made none of that matter when I was painting it. It was something fresh. I think when I get artist's block in the future I'll play with more mixed media. I still have all my collage stuff from college I've not used.
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