Making of Judithby Marta Dahlig, Poland


11. Discussing Silk – Now my character somewhat painted, I immediately moved onto defining the surrounding textiles. The clue to successful fabrics painting is knowing exactly what type of material you want to portrait, as each of the types has their specific way of depiction, both in terms of texture and modeling. In this case, I wanted the surrounding pink material to become silk, the light brown hanging material – satin and the blue and orange cloths organza-like. Painting silk is quite tricky in terms of modeling the textile, as there should be a multitude of small, soft folds. In terms of coloring, since the material is shiny and smooth, the color and highlight-to-shadow transitions should be rapid, condensed over small areas.


12. Some notes on Composition - In the middle of my work, I always flip the image horizontally to see, whether there is something that still needs fixing. Quite often the new perspective looks so tempting, that I keep the flip. In this case, however, this is absolutely undoable. The composition was created in a way to guide the viewer through various elements of the painting -starting from the left, leading the view through the hip to the character’s face and later, at the very end, guiding downwards to the key of the piece, which is the cut off head. As you can see on the image, flipping the piece destroys this logical sequence: the most interesting areas are shown at the beginning, and thus the right side looks simply uninteresting...

13. Carpeting - One of the most complicated elements I planned for the painting is the carpet hanging from the bed. After searching for various references and knowing exactly what design I wanted, I started sketching the primary shapes with my regular brush on a very, very low opacity. With this technique the beginnings rarely look attractive but, as you can see the video, applying layers of paint on top of each other soon results in more clarified shapes.


14. Character Polishing -  Once background and foreground details marked in, I proceeded to finish the character. I added some last minute shades to the character’s skin, enriching the palette with more pink tones to add to the liveliness of the flesh. Not to disturb the current smooth blending, to the hip I applied the hues with a spackled brush – brushes like these are absolutely wonderful when you want to apply color and blend it in effortlessly at the same time.



15. Beautification – For painting the hairs, I lowered the diameter of my default brush and ran with it over the sketched area. To give the strands some extra texture, I applied a few strokes with a regular three-dot brush. After creating such a highly textured basis, I went back to painting several strands by hand, to avoid having an artificial feel. Aside from shading particular strands, I also shaded the whole curls together, adding some general shadows and highlights. Later, I enriched the face in some pinkish and yellowish shades as well as textured the lips and added eye lashes.