Making of Be My Valentine by Omar Díaz, Spain

Finally I added the spot light (the lighter part of the iris is the opposite of the spotlight and vice versa) and others tiny lights of almost pure white on the most convex areas and on the lachrymal to make them wet.

At this point the character is almost finished.

I created some adjustment layers like color balance and levels, and increased the saturation of the reds. I blurred the parts of the hair that are more far away and dyed it so lightly with the background color.

PENDANT

It’s time to add more ornaments and symbolism into the image. I created the pendant on a new document at high-res to work easy on details. I brought it later to my image in a new layer, then resized it, adjusted the levels again and searched the best position.

The chains were made with a custom brush with a medium gray tone, then used warp tool until I was happy with the result. Marking the box of “preserve transparency”, I added shadows and lights and played a bit with the Dodge tool. Finally I blurred it for a more natural touch and added a little red glow. At the end I made the shadow cast on a new layer below.

Before detailing the dress I retouched the torso and her left arm, which was deformed. I overlaid a fabric texture to the dress for under painting. Although my first idea was closer to the velvet; I decided it would work better a semitransparent organza fabric.

The key is creating transparent layers on top of each other’s, creating more opaque folds when overlapping.

I painted with an airbrush a thin highlighted stroke to simulate the edges of the fabric. Where the dress is closer to the skin I applied some sampled skin tone.

I also changed the flower hair for a more symbolic red rose.

As attention remains on the character, the background should be very simple, so I only added different textures on three different layers using overlay and soft light modes and an opacity between 10-30%.

Also in order to make the reading of the image easier, I used some heart brushes from (http://torpedo-design.deviantart.com) and (http://mcbadshoes.deviantart.com) to guide the viewer to the different focal points and also get a sense of connection and depth.

In last minute I decided to change her eyes for a more saturated blue to pop up, also I detailed the iris a lot more and giving them a more wet look.

I duplicated the final image and settled it to soft light mode, made a Gaussian blur and downed the opacity of the layer at 10% to add more contrast, I repeated the process this time to add linear light mode.

Finally I scanned a piece of paper and overlaid on top at 6% opacity, for a more traditional look. Time to put my signature and it’s finished!!!!

Thanks so much for reading, I really hope this walkthrough could be of some help to you, if you have any questions about it, please be free to send me a mail. Here you can see the animated gif.

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