painting process

In June 2020 I participated in round 4 of Qurantine Collab. This round’s theme was Quarantine Mysteries, which led to a fun Nancy Drew inspired illustration.

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I looked at vintage Nancy Drew covers for compositon/subject inspiration. Nancy is always actively doing something, usually investigating while making a determined or shocked face. My fashion inspiration came mostly from old Nancy Drew covers as well, but I looked at vintage black movie stars for hair inspiration. There were a ton of amazing styles to choose from, but I chose this look from Sarah Vaughan because… just look at her. An absolute icon. I found this look in an Essence article on iconic hairstyles during the Harlem Renaisance, so check that out if you want more black women with fabulous vintage looks. I based the pose on the SenshiStock image above, though I definitely took some liberties.

We were provided with a palette for the collab, and I chose to go the painterly route of using the palette to mix my individual base colors. Lately I’ve enjoyed doing a rough paint over to color block my colors before I go in and do a clean paint layer. It allows me to get a better sense of how the colors play together.

The cleaned up flat colors are fairly self explanatory. I hadn’t settled on a background color yet.

Before doing any sort of global rendering of the light and shadow, I did local rendering to bring out the forms.

I then went in with global shadow (my trusty multiply layer) and a simple light blue rim light. I also remembered to give her lips, because that’s a thing humans have.

At this point I hit my deadline for the collab and submitted it. I had a lot of fun playing around with texture overlays to make this look like an old book, and also going through my fonts to find the perfect vintage mystery look.

I thought I was done, but the next day when I opened Procreate I felt like I could push the lighting more. So I went onto another rendering stage with the lights, and also completely redid the rendering on the hair and her left hand. It was absolutely worth it- the eerie blue glowing rim light helps sell the piece, and the hair and the hand are much better rendered in this version.

I composited the new render into my old compositing document, and while I liked it, it wasn’t quite 100% at the old book levels I wanted.

After getting some advice on color adjustments, I plopped on a pile of adjustment layers in Photoshop, and just as importantly two extra dust and scratches layers. Much better!

This was my first major illustration of 2020 thanks to the pandemic, but I’d spent the past few months working through some character design Schoolism lessons. It’s nice to see that the work I put into character design ended up paying off overall in this illustration, though next I might jump into some painting classes.

[kofi]