Render 51625

Wow, I, uh, sortuh popped off with this one. I did not mean for this render study to go this hard, but, damn: she look good.

How did I do it? Honestly, I can't even remember, because so much of it was just shading and shading and shading; and pushing the values; and air brushing more and more red to give the skin heat. Then I spent a solid thirty minutes futzing with the adjustment toggles; tweaking the curves; adjusting the contrast to make the line art in her hair pop; adding more yellow to the color balance to match the original reference; and continuously applying adjustments until I was satisfied; after all my rendering. After which I added a gradient just to spotlight her hair while gracefully easing the eye toward her bust.

Probably the most enjoyable part was adding all the fly-aways to liven up her haircut. Touches like that added dimension to the subject.

The second most enjoyable part? I'd say drawing her eyelashes by adding highlights to the waterline, to simulate light bouncing off her bottom lashes, then adding a drop shadow to push the effect.

Why a study I budgeted for thirty minutes took two (going on three!) hours was my deference to the original's choice in skin tone. The manhwa artist, based on the sample I eyedrop'd, didn't add more temperature to their shadows; they actually moved away, removing heat from their palette, a decision which was...counterintuitive given their expertise elsewhere. Here's what I mean:

Shading for the skin, regardless of the subject, is based on the color of the subject's blood. A spider, for instance, has blue blood; so, blue is what you add when you shade a spider. When you shade a banana slug, which has yellow blood, yellow is what you use. For humans our blood shares the same basic pigment irrespective of melanin, ergo, the more layers of skin exposed, the redder the flesh becomes. The reason why the skin tone on the original is so muddy is because, instead of adding heat to the palette for the shadows they subtracted. They did a million things right, that's why I studied this work, but that, to be frank, was a genuine misstep.

Another point of deference I had from the reference was our choice in color for the hair; the original artist went with a dark green, I chose dark blue. Because that was Elisa Maza's hair color in 'Gargoyles', and I prefer that palette. It preserves the line art, but, in retrospect, I think the original's choice in hair color-- sacrificing line clarity to contour the subject's face-- and add contrast to the subject's skin -- was the right call.