Girl of the Grasses - Part 01

* The finished piece can be seen here. *

* Part 02 of the screen recording can be watched here. *

Depending on your connection speed, you'll either see this video moving at warp drive or a reasonable speed.

BREAKDOWN:

1) I start by blocking out the boundaries that I'll be coloring in. The flash of black you see is me creating the base color for the grayscale shading. This is done several times for different objects in the illustration.

2) I move on to the general lighting. I've restricted the light to be cast in only two levels of black and one soft highlight.

3) The grayscale shading is then converted to color using a gradient map. I use separate gradient maps for her skin, lips, eyes, and hair.

4) I move on to refinement in other areas...

I wasn't conscious of all the rotation and zooming that goes on when I work. Hopefully this video is still watchable and helpful in some way...

Everything you see takes place in Photoshop CS4.

Also, one frame of video equals one second of work time.
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DOWNLOAD SIZE = 600x400, 30 fps, 26.5MB
RUN TIME = 3:40