Hairy process
Ninja March 24th, 2008
Here are the steps for my bird nest/geisha hair portrait.
The eyes are the window to the soul, so I always start there. No real reason why I was using a blue pencil other than I couldn’t find my regular pencils and this one was just on my desk.
I really enjoy drawing/inking hair. Yes, I was inking on top of my laptop. I could have cleared the table, but I was too lazy. I was listening to Radiohead and Death Cab for Cutie on iTunes, too.
I go about blocking in the shadows and midtones. Highlights are created by leaving those areas blank, so the white of the paper shows through. I just started using the Rives BFK paper, and it soaks in the ink wonderfully (plus, it’s thick enough that the moisture doesn’t cause it to warp like crazy). Good stuff.
After layers and layers of ink, the hair is done.
It’s lonely, so I add a little, feathered friend. I think it also gives the portrait a bit of a fairy-tale vibe (and kind of makes the funky hair style excusable).
I deepened the blues in the face and finished inking the bird.
Here, Stefan pointed out that the bird’s tail was too large in proportion to his body. What can I say? The man’s got a critical eye and a keen sense of detail. Danke, Stefan for your help!
With the pen tool, I created a selection of the bird’s tail and moved it to another layer (I feathered that selection by .2 pixels so that there wouldn’t be such a hard edge). Then I scaled and rotated it to the proper proportion. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough image (because it originally bled off the page). With a bit more of the pen tool, cloning stamp, and healing brush, the extra bits of the tail were created.
Happy Drawing,
Ninja ^__^
