I redrew more strands on top of the blended hair base making the hair come more to life that way, with some highlights and other darker strands here and there. I then realised that maybe I should try using a custom brush to speed things up. I used a custom brush made of little dots with the same settings as before plus spacing at 1%. I recommend it if you don’t want to go mad painting hair.
Shadows on the neck level under the pearls were added.
You will notice that I also flipped the canvas. You wouldn’t believe how much it helps after you’ve been looking at the same thing for hours and hours on end...by flipping the canvas it was almost as if my eyes were looking at the painting for the first time, and I could see where it needed fixing. Also cleaned up the outline of the cheek, drew in the eyesbrows a bit better, and finally some blotches on the hand...
Here I had painted part of the now erased sleeve in grayscale, so don’t mind that, I just don’t have any other screens of this stage. You will note thte black background, no real reason for doing that, I just wanted to see how it looked with a dark background, and I could see the outlines better and if they were clean.
The main thing at this stage was the texturing I did on the skin. I used 2 textures on the skin: One with pores in grey scale, and a color map with freckles.
I duplicated the skin level. I never apply a texture before first keeping a copy of the original level! On the duplicated level I applied the pore texture using the texturizer. The settings I used were scaling @ 50% and relief @ 9. The direction I selected was the same as the light source in the picture.
For the freckles, I didn't use the texturizer. I opened the freckle texture on a level of its own and scaled the image to the size that looked ok. This level is the one on top of all the others since I wanted it to affect the whole painting.
I then applied the following settings to the freckle level: i set the level style to linear burn and brought down the opacity to 43%. Wherever I didn't want the freckles (like on the collar) I just smudged.
Before starting on the hand and finishing the collar I decided to do the background. Big mistake! (for me anyhow). The background, which is supposed to look like a silk curtain thing hanging, was fairly fast and easy to do, wheras the hand was time consuming, as was finishing the collar.
I started cleaning up around the borders of the collar.
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