Girl and Planet Process

Girl, Planet and Maybe Butterflies

This is one of my start to finish process records. It's as much for me as for you. I hope you find it useful. It's helped remind me to be more disciplined when creating an image.

I doodle on scrap paper almost all the time. It's better than scrolling on a phone. Usually they come to nothing, one day I had a couple of ideas that hung around. Years ago I'd written a story about a group of young people exploring a giant dying spaceship. One character was fascinated by butterflies, although she had never seen a real one.

I doodled the girl and butterflies many times, always vague and light. This was the image that excited me. In the story the girl was very short and stocky. A friend built her a high tech hammer.

I explored both hammer and girl. The hammer became a staff, the girl appears taller in the final image, it was more the choice of angle and me being rubbish at proportions. 

It was then a matter of hunting down references, including me and family posing, to get things right. I did scheme a pencil wireframe to try to get the pose correct. I think it worked here. I'm not sure it did so in the finished image.

When I was happy with the pose I tried a grey-scale image. This is where I was impatient. I didn't complete it as I wanted to paint things. This led to many reworks in the middle of the paiting and my frustration with the picture and myself. You can see grey-scale image to the right. I didn't develop the face here. I did separate sketches and modelling of the head. I was never happy with it and kept reworking it. It's easy to work the life out of the picture doing this. Or it does for me.

I should have been more patient and take the time to complete a whole grey-scale image. All the images were scanned into Krita to be worked on.

For colours I looked for images that had a colour balance that pleases me. I found several using blue and purple. I then played with the Coolors that allows you to create a colour platte and gives suggestions. That was the easy part, the colours worked and so I started painting. Too early in hindsight.

My digital painting approach has changed little over years. I paint using Krita. I create flat colours under the line work, then use other layers to work up the shadows and highlights. I don't like working with many layers so regularly flatten them. I usually keep a flat colour layer to help select regions. For the overall picture I use three groups of layers for Background, Middle and Foreground. I was flattening layer stacks as often as possible, with the aim of finishing with three layers of back, middle and foreground. One day I'll be brave enough to paint on a single layer.

I aim to limit the number of brushes so I can focus on image creation rather than hunting for the perfect brush. Fiddling and selecting brushes is an easy way to waste a painting session. For this image I used Basic-6 Details as my 'pencil' to create linework. The Basic-1 and Basic-5 Size to fill in flat colours. Once the flats were done I broke my rule and hunted for brushes to create random textures everywhere. Krita has loads of texture brushes by default. Then it was shadows and highlights which were created using Basic Opacity Oval, Wet circle and blender blur. I build up major blocks of light and shade then push and pull colours with the blending tools.

I wanted a simple background. A planet and some mountains. I used a circle section then attacked it with a texture brush. The same approach with the mountains. There are many wonderful pictures of real planets available from both NASA and ESA to use as a guide. Find a good planetry photo and use it as a guide to what a planet should look like.

The next picture was a half-way house, which was actually about a third of the time into creating the picture. One button was created then copied and repeated adjusting the shape for the different positions. I wasn't happy with the hands and kept reworking and reworking them again. After about 15 to 20 hours I finished the image. Or rather I couldn't work on it anymore despite feeling it could do with more work.

To butterfly or not to butterfly...

I had created the butterflies first and added them into the picture when the figure and background were done. I felt the multicoloured creatures broke the image. I liked the one without the butterflies more. Here are the two images, which do you prefer?

What Worked

I think the colours worked. They worked well together and none seemed to clash or throw the picture off. The simple background too meant the figure remained in focus and didn't draw the eye too much.

As is often the case, it drifted away from what I could see in the doodle.

What Didn't Work, or What did I do wrong?

As is often the case, I feel I lost the energy that was in the original sketchy doodle. Of course, a lot of that energy is in my head rather than the very vague image.

There would have been less effort and frustration if I had been less impatient and worked out all the design problems in simplier grey scale or even in the pencils. From that a clear, problem-free line work could have been the foundation for the picture.

I'm still not happy with the hands. One thing I've learnt is to stop. An artist can spend a lifetime trying to fix a picture. A new picture is the best way and more practice. Let us see what happens next time.