Princess Leia

Princess Leia

Just 'cuz 2016 needed to get in one more knee to the groin of my childhood...

The year 2016 on my Blog started with a painting of Luke Skywalker, looking pensively off into the future, and ends with a drawing of Princess Leia (nee the late Carrie Fisher).  

It is a fearful symmetry that I find strangely fitting: My Blog started the year with "A New Hope", and ended with a loss of "Hope" (with an intentional nod to "Rogue One").

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STEP ONE:  I roughed in a line drawing with a charcoal pencil on an 8-1/2" x 11" gray, toned cardstock.

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STEP TWO:  Here is the (mostly) finished charcoal portion of the drawing, showing the shading and modelling the features.  

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STEP THREE:  I used a white chalk pencil to create highlights and the white areas.  Here is a secret: do your black-and-white drawings on a toned paper to give it an extra "pop".  It gives you three values (dark, medium tone, light) for the price of two (black-and-white).  It's almost like cheating!

Also, the right-eye was a little off, so I re-drew it.  It's still not perfect, but vastly improved.

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STEP FOUR:  In Photoshop, I created a MULTIPLY Layer to colorize the drawing; on a NORMAL Layer, I did final highlights over top.  I decided keep the colors muted and let most of the grain from the charcoal to show through, and just keep the background as is.

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This was done in charcoal and colorized in Photoshop.

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Digital Quick Paint - K-2SO

K-2SO

In honor of "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story", here's a digital quick paint of one of my favorite characters from the movie: K-2SO, a reprogrammed Imperial Droid.  His deadpan delivery and steady sarcasm made him one of my favorite characters in the movie.

I won't give any spoilers, but "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" really put the "War" in "Star Wars".  There are quite a few Easter Eggs and surprise cameos scattered throughout the movie, and the last 5-10 minutes of the movie will bring an excited glee of recognition to the hearts of any "Star Wars: A New Hope" fan.  I'll give it 4-1/2 out of 5 Kyber Crystals.

I suppose "quick paint" is a relative term, as this was done over the course of 2-1/2 hours or so.

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STEP ONE:  Here is the quick digital pencils and color layout on a 900px x 900px canvas.

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STEP TWO:  Well, I guess I could have put in a few more in-between steps...  Oh, well.  In the background, I just used a textured brush to to give the illusion of a sandstone type surface.  From there, I built up the colors on K-2SO, trying to make him look like a matte, gun-metal surface with light and shaded areas, and built toward refining the details.  I would have liked to run another pass over the drawing to fix his collar area and fill in a few more details, but unfortunately ran out of time and so had to call it "Good 'nuff".  

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Done digitally in Photoshop.

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