Carrie Goes to Prom

 
Happy belated Halloween, y'all! I started the structure work for this she-beast during, oh, October 16th (around there) and, now that I'm no longer plague-riddled or bereft of any free time, I finally finished it. (Now I can stop listening to John Carpenter synth for hours on a loop!) www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eiijm2…

 I will, however, keep listening to the OST for 'Carrie' the musical. 
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oAorl…


The technical bits: 
Her gown was the biggest time glut; it took (estimated) about five or six hours to get it right. Most versions of Carrie White don't bother soaking the gown, but, when you're drenched head to toe in a thick liquid, it tends to be the case that your clothes are going to be sopping wet. For the billion and one wrinkles, I studied mikey mega mega's tutorial on wet clothes, as well as his Q & A speed draw with another pin up, while also studying some supplementary text; because mikey's example was a white dress shirt, and Carrie's gown is a soft (I wannuh say "corral"?). In any case, it's pink, a light pink.

Colors darken when wet, so, what I did was I pointed my mouse over the layer I wanted to select, holding down ctrl while clicking the layer's icon, and highlighted the entire gown; picked a deep pink with lots of red; took a fat hard brush and swiped the layer under the gown deep pink. Then, on the primary color layer of the gown, I lasso'd all the gaps, got a soft fat air brush, flipped on my pressure sensitivity , and erased the gaps between wrinkles, creating the illusion of wet fabric, darkened by a liquid, clinging to the skin. 

 For the back lighting on Carrie, I made a gradient layer over her, set the layer to overlay, and erased all the color around her until she was the only darkened subject. Next I used a soft round air brush and added a rim light around her. To make her pop just a lllittle bit more I duplicated the fire layer (after I squashed that entire folder into one single background composition) and added a Gaussian blur filter.  

 To paint the blood I used a hard brush with a sharp taper and just...well, tried to make sense, as best as I could in (I think) five hours of work. I stared at some cell shading references of blood, more representational forms in 'Vox Machina' and more elaborate forms in the anime 'Black Lagoon'. The latter was, by far, more useful. I also studied original shots from the original movie with Sissy Spacek as Carrie. 

 Right away I noticed the tops of her breasts were soaked with blood, but the undersides were only partly stained. That made sense, the breasts act as a shelf, overhanging the rib cage; which also tracked with the less saturated gap between her chest and her waist, after which the blood more or less snakes all the way down, down, down to her ankles before branching off, leaving slashes of pink. 

 As stylized as this was, I tried to contour the blood with the body as much as I could while not creating too much "noise". Constantly, I kept erasing and re-painting the rivulets of blood to be less "busy"; which is super common, as it turns out, with Carrie fan art. The tendency is either to allude to the blood sparingly or just soak her more or less solid red, those two schools of thought dominate pinterest. The chief concern, that I've noticed, is keeping the visuals crisp and simple. 

 For the face I used Frank Cho's 'Drawing Beautiful Women' and the expression I swiped from some anime screen shot I had in my expressions board on pinterest. It's referenced in the film that Carrie isn't an ugly girl, she's just frumpy and repressed courtesy of her fire-and-brimstone misanthrope of a mother. That detail noted, I made the decision to give her a bit of a makeover, careful about keeping the forehead, brow line and base of the nose an even 1/3rd apart; keeping the eyes big enough to be cute but smaller than the reference for her expression; and, of course, I subscribe to Kooleen's school of beauty: the lips need to be juicy. For the color palette there, I swiped a screen shot from 'Lodoss War' and used Pirotess' lips as a reference. 

 For more details: I took a soft airbrush, made the top lip darker than the bottom, applied an eraser to firm up the outline of the mouth, and then I added a soft highlight on one layer, made another one, set it to color dodge, and added a brighter tinier highlight on top. 

 One last thing: The original reference for her pose was an adult model with thicc hips and a waist-throttling corset, so, to make Carrie teenaged I used liquify to tweak her proportions--to pair the hips and booba down to a more high school friendly ratio, keeping her shoulders wider than her pelvis and her bust more modestly scaled. Liquify and I are BFFs now.