Making of Judithby Marta Dahlig, Poland


16. Getting Pillows Done - The “core” of the image, I now moved onto the arduous part of the job – polishing my character’s surroundings. From the very beginning I decided to push myself quite far when it comes to polishing, so I worked much more on the detailing than I usually would have had. At the same time I did not want to define every bit to the last pixel – I much rather hint details than paint them precisely. This lets me retain a painterly feeling of the image. As you can see on the video, for the pillow, as  it was the case with other elements, I started with huge, transparent shapes gradually moving onto smaller and more opaque brushes. To avoid over detailing I hinted some light color blobs to simulate embroidered patterns and highlighted convexities.


17. Overall Detailing - Using the same low opacity stroke technique I defined the light brown satin on the corner of the bed. The biggest difference between shading satin and silk is the structure – satin tends to be thicker and thus the folds are more solid and rough looking in terms of color transitions, which basically means that the highlights will be spread along bigger areas and the transitions between shadows and highlights will not be as rapid as it was with silk. Having the basic satin shading done, I painted some blobs simulating embroidery. To quickly smooth up messy blobs, just like in this case, I used a median filter on my strokes – this creates a slightly blurry, but solid enough basis to place some further strokes upon. This trick is good for basically any element but is especially effective in case of backgrounds.

18. A silky Touch – Painting silk was a really tough process. As mentioned before, two things that have to be minded are the structure (folding) and the texture (highlight placement and smoothness). I had the folds in place but the sketch was greatly dominated by highlights and shadows, and so, the polishing process was mainly a matter of strengthening the midtone. In order to do so, I simply ran across the areas with a highly saturated crimson color and applied it between shadows and highlights on top of the folds. To boost the realism some more, I added small highlights along the borders of the textile to underline its edges.



19. Pattern Frenzy - Getting the details of the hanging carpet right was one of the most tedious tasks I have ever had to face. The recording doesn’t really show how hard and slow did the whole process go – I have made various preparation sketches to try most successful techniques and came with a solution after a few hours of trying. In this case, I also tried to hint detail instead of painting everything too closely. Gradually lowering the diameter and rising the opacity, I put in the blobs on top of each other. As shown in the video, doing so quite often forced me to define the borders by painting in darker blobs around lighter patterns in order to raise the contrast and overall realism of the design.

20. Thoughts on Organza - One of the more tricky elements of the painting was the organza curtain. The logic and process of painting transparent textiles is completely different from regu-lar fabrics – it is not a matter of texture, but color placement and coordination. The key to painting a successful transparent fabric (like organza or muslin) is underlining its transparency by overlap-ping consecutive layers of fabric on top of each other, simulating folds. A good small touch that greatly adds to the realism is defining the actual edges of the textile with a thin highlighted stroke.


Final Comments - So, this is basically it. After taking on last look at the piece I added some last minute textures to the background with my texturing brush as well as some golden jewelry to the character to underline the richness of the scene. Whew, after hours of working, I can finally consider myself done! The process of preparing these materials was very challenging, yet still fun for me, and I hope you found it interesting. In case of any questions, feel free to drop me an e-mail to marta [at] marta-dahlig.com

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