Friday, December 30, 2016

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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