Shine!

What to do if you spend hours shading your goddess with colored pencils and still don't like the result? Scan her into Photoshop, put her into a cool background, embellish a little and then you won't have to throw her away! Plus, you really don't want to start ripping pages out of your new Moleskine do you?

Ugh! I worked on this one for a long time trying to get the shading just right. I'm okay with most of the colors even though I have a LONG way to go before I will get the result I want. But when I finished, I stepped back and looked at her. I'm just not that into her. ;) Her proportions are all wrong, her face is too long, I should make this a song... blah, blah, blah. So I put her into a digital world and now she's much more goddess-like placed there in the heavens.

I scanned her into the computer, made her a PNG file and used the Hard Light blending mode to give her the look I wanted on that background. Much better. And what a cool background! It's from the Gloaming collection at Scrap Artist.com. Love it!! Then I added a few embellishments from some other digital files and now she can shine!

Here she is in the bare Moleskine state:

Not too hot. I learned a lot from the mistakes of this one. So I'll keep practicing...drawing and shading until I get it right. Hopefully by the end of the workshop I'll have created something I love. The next lesson goes up tomorrow. We will be embellishing our journal backgrounds. Then in the final two weeks we will work with the goddesses that we did only in graphite. Mine was posted a few postings back. I really like her and hope I don't mess her up. She's now covered in a layer of clear gesso and mounted to wood ready for ... whatever the lesson will have us do!

Now, back to the sketchbook. I did draw a goddess last night that I'm kind of liking...we'll see where this one takes me. :)