Step by Step Illustration Process : "Girl with a Glowing Sphere"

(Sorry for the blurred pic.)

This is the final image for “Girl with Glowing Sphere”

As a full-time illustrator, I often find myself having art blocks, or burn-outs. They say If you do what you love for a living, then u never have to work a day in your life. However, I can safely say, at least for myself, that this saying is not true. Maybe only a half truth. Basically, once the art is made for other people and you have to answer to them, the magic you experienced when you drew your first stickman will slowly fade. In worse cases, the working hazard will erode the affection for art in artists.
But please don’t get me wrong. This is not a cry-me-a-river post, for I am grateful, and luckier than most people to be doing this. I think what I am getting at is, the best thing about art is the uncertainty part. When you think of it, art itself is uncertainty. Abstract. Subjective. So, when u fuse such subjectivity with an objectivity like work, it becomes a drag after a while. On one hand u have the driving force for emotions, dreams, and faith. On the other, you have rationality, plans, and logic. And you are supposed to use both sides of your brain to be a sane person. Colliding these two polarized forces though, is no fun thing and I guess you can’t have your cake and eat it too. They work with and against each other in fascinating never-ending paradoxes of life. Sometimes I just want to not know things but learning and discovering things is also a part of the magic. Hence, the half-truth, my constant inner battle as a subscriber for sentimentality and art.
But enough of my rambling. Whenever I come home from making art at work, I will destress myself with my hobby, which of course, is making art. So, I will restrain myself from having a direction as to where or how the artwork is going to look and just go with flow.

So here is the breakdown of the process.

I begin most of my personal work with random brush strokes and colors. There were only few times I have fully-developed ideas. Usually I pick up some ideas when I have half or most of my canvas just randomly painted in. This time, I carved out a girl’s face from one layer of airbrushed colors. Maybe out of the human habit of seeing faces in everything we see. But most probably because it was the comfort zone and somehow drawing girls was making me happier. And that was the idea, right?

Around this process, I tried to find a suitable positioning of the portrait to develop the artwork further. As you can see I highlighted the girl’s hair by increasing saturation from the top half and a hint of purple in the darker area at the back of her head. I softly used liquify tool to transform her hair and face into basic form of shape and curve for geometrical happiness and irony. So much for uncertainty and going with the flow. Her overall features had also been changed, from an adult-ish face, she became much younger. I put some more detail to her clothes, aiming for the knitted sweater look.

Then I transform the girl again to make her looked more natural. I lifted her left shoulder and repainted some part of the hair. Rearranged the hair too to cover her forehead and show less hairline. I also reminded myself by this time to flip the image occasionally to look for anomalies or something out of place.

Retrospectively, I kind of like this first out the three images with her upper body being left un-rendered. It looked effortless and maybe easier on the eye. I once heard on a podcast or a tutorial video that sometimes illustration works better if you have the willingness to leave something out. Along the lines of, less is more. But like everything, there is no right way. Here I felt that the girl lacked context so I added a few more detail. A magenta ribbon and a sphere.

I mashed up some random images and spherized it to make the sphere she’s holding. There is a filter in photoshop for that: Filter > Distort > Spherize… I lost the mapping file of the sphere to show you because I worked on it solely for this and I might have deleted the layer. I then painted her left arm holding the sphere. I referred my own hand to make it looked real but not really aiming for realism. I darken her hand similar to the shading of her torso before putting the blueish rim-light between her fingers.

I used blending options to make the sphere seemed to be emanating light. During this process, I also worked on the simple background separately. I created the background using the three main colors from the portrait, yellow, red and blue then pasted it behind the subject. I also tried to fix the left arm looking like it was detached from her whole body. Finally, I corrected the value and tones of the overall illustration and let them blend together.

I made a simple gif to show the sphere glows. As I said, I did not have any initial idea on how this artwork was going to be like. Subconsciously, I think this portrait symbolizes my concern about what I wrote in the introductory of this post. About this beautiful existence that hinges on the contradictory parallels and tangents, of abstracts and logics. Balance and chaos. Yin and Yang. A girl holding a sphere can be seen as us holding a magic 8-ball to help us, ironically, make our day-to-day decisions and plans.

Until next time. Thank you.

• Afique