The next step was creating a rough composition, where the placement, size, direction, and in some cases pose of each character will be determined. As you can see, at this point it’s rough enough that I have to write down names even for myself.<\/p>\n
Then comes the part where I remind myself that drawing real-life people isn’t usually my thing and wonder what have I gotten myself into. But Queen Lilibet inspired me to go on; one must power through! The sketching phase is where I flesh out the character and define their expression – based on what I feel works for them, but also influenced by the reference images available.<\/p>\n The next phase is refining the sketches with cleaner lines and working more closely with the visual reference, mostly for the likeness, but also for clothing and accessories. It looks a little like this while I work, except usually the photos are on the right side. It took me a good long while to work out it’ll be better if they were on the right because I kept hiding them with my left hand. Lefties can be very silly like that.<\/p>\n Here they all are, crisp and clean. Each one is on a separate layer so I can easily move them around if needed.<\/p>\n Moving on to colour, I create a base for each character (again, all separate layers) and make sure the different skin tones look right, on their own and in relation to one another. The reference photos had a huge range of tones due to lighting, so it was kind of a guessing-and-adjusting game.<\/p>\n Stephanie Beatriz (Rosa from Brooklyn 99) was super duper awesome and shared my artwork on Twitter<\/a> with some really lovely words, so I’ll spotlight her to show the process zoomed-in. The top row is the process so far. Then I add specific colours, using the same method shown here<\/a>, of adding colour layers as clipping masks, so I don’t have to worry about “painting outside the lines” of the base colour layer I created earlier. Next I add some soft shading (basically just a purple layer set to Multiply, masked as needed). And the last bit is adding some details – small highlights, clothes\/hair patterns etc.<\/p>\n They all underwent the same process and came out the other side, looking colourful. Mmmm, too colourful.<\/p>\n Now comes the part I usually struggle with most when it comes to colour: taking all these individually painted or coloured elements – that work just fine on their own but kinda clash with one another – and combining them into a single cohesive piece. Thank goodness again for digital tools, I have no idea how I would even approach something like that in traditional media. But in Photoshop I try out various adjustment layers set to all kinds of layer modes until things look better. This time I also tried some actual filters<\/em>, an area of Photoshop which I usually steer clear of, and they gave some interesting subtle effects (which might not even be visible in the end result, to be honest). Here’s the piece after some adjustments.<\/p>\n![\"TV](\"http:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/01_layout.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"TV](\"http:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/02_sketch.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"TV](\"http:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/rosa_refs.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"TV](\"http:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/03_pencil.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"TV](\"http:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/04_base_colour.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"TV](\"http:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/rosa_process.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"TV](\"http:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/05_colour.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
![\"TV](\"http:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/06_adjustments.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"TV](\"http:\/\/www.avivor.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/tvladies_2017.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"