Elerin: Personal Character

Click for better detail.

This character is from a book of which I have only written fragments, but basically the premise centers around a kingdom where some people have discovered a way to transform into animals at will. Elerin is another princess, but since she is one of the characters who can transform I thought it would be fun to paint her kind of half transformed...I guess to show that she can.

This portrait took longer than the last one I did, mostly because of the 3/4 view which can make things less straight forward than dead center.

Emma: personal character

Here was a "quickie" - it took me maybe 5-6 hours total and was done all in one day. That's quite enough staring at a screen for one day, but I thought I would post it and then perhaps take a break.

Again, Blogger has effectively destroyed the finer parts of this image. So click to see it like it really should look.

She is a character from one of my books. Her name is Emma and she eventually becomes queen at the end of the book. Unfortunately, there is lots of nasty stuff on the way to that moment, which is why I decided to paint her looking a bit sad.

I like the colors, but like I said before, red is my favorite color, so I'm probably really biased. Still, I like the way her face kind of grows out of the red. This was also my first time painting black hair, so be kind. In the end I included lots of red reflections to give me something to work with. This is a little more stylized than I generally work, but I like the way it turned out.

At My Window Seat

First off, a blogger I read mentioned that Blogger does yucky things with pictures you upload. I am noticing this now. If you click on the image, you get the nice crisp version, so do that please. This condensed thing looks nowhere near as good as it should. You can also see it in my gallery at DeviantArt.

This one took many, many hours. I worked so hard on so many different aspects of this (face, hands, hair, objects in room, etc.) that I'm afraid that one of its major weaknesses is that there are too many focal points. However, I am proud of my work and consider it a stepping stone onto better things....

I'm not really sure where the idea for this came from, but I do remember that the original idea centered around the light. I knew I wanted a really bright light source, one that would force me to think about shading a face in a way that didn't depend so heavily on dark shadows. I was torn at one point between lowering the amount of light coming from the window in order to better feature what she might be looking at (which I also debated for some time) but decided against it, since the light was really the main subject of this one and I wanted to keep it that way.

Here's a lesson I learned with this one: images in the mirror are harder to paint than they appear.

The girl has a kind of harlequin vibe, which was kind of unplanned in the beginning, but which I came to like. It all started when I was doing her makeup and "accidentally" did what I consider to be my best mouth yet. (Zoom in close, please!) Then I continued the look as best I could throughout the rest of her look.

I guess the last thing I should say about this is that it took me the longest time to finally settle on what she should be looking at. I originally thought bird, since I wanted the natural things visible outside the window (the few they are) to contrast with the crowded, overworked, overstuffed, overdressed, fusty interior. But then I couldn't figure out why a bird would be looking in a window. Or how. Since birds don't hover.

So then I thought fairy. But that just didn't go with the theme, and when I think fairy, I think bright thing...and that would require lowering the light of the window so that such a fairy would actually glow, and I wasn't willing to do that.

And then it hit me: HUMMINGBIRDS HOVER. And they are BIRDS. Problem solved.
A close up that kind of solves some focus problems (but Blogger will ruin the image, so please, again, zoom in.)