Making of Halloween Witch by Amber Chen, Georgia Web: www.kagaminoir.com


Along the way, I decided, at the suggestion of a friend who thought the breasts looked too pasted on, to alter the top of her dress a bit, a change which was done to the respective base layers.



By the way, feel free to use as many layers as you need for you to be confident.  For instance, on her face, the eyelashes are on a separate layer as are the highlights.  On the boots, the reflection from her skin is on a different layer from the main shading.  This makes it easy for me to correct anything that needs it.

Unlined Parts

Meanwhile, as you can see, I had already started on the witch's hair, which was the first undefined part that I tackled.  For this painting, I divided it into a bangs layer, which went on top of the skin layer, and a braid layer, which went behind her layers.  It's easiest to start hair with a dark color and then layer lighter-colored strands on top.  You should establish the general flow of the hair with dark and medium colors and gradually build detail on top with the lighter colors interspersed with additional darks and with smaller brushes.  I also added a redder tinge here and there for a little bit of color variation.  Here is how the bulk of the braid turned out.



I decided that I wanted the highlights to be a little bit brighter and softer, so on a new layer; I took the brightest color and lightly swiped over the highlights with a large brush.



Finally, with the default 3-pixel brush, I added wayward hairs singly on a new layer.  A lot of them are taken from the lighter spectrum of the hair colors, but I also added some dark ones.  Then I went to the Gaussian blur in the filters and blurred the layer very slightly; usually 0.2 to 0.4 pixels is sufficient to soften the hairs just a touch and get rid of the harshness of the hard brush.