To rise again

I wanted to draw another image of Veronika which led to this images. I also needed a background for her to be tied to, as part of the fixings were missing in the reference image, so I chose something related to the coming holidays.

This was done with Prisma color col-erase black and Bristol Board.

As usual I started with the easy grid method and some line work you probably can't see :)

I started this picture just before going away for the weekend. As I didn't want to break my flow for the main image I started with the background. Also working top to bottom, left to right the top of the cross made a good place to start. I really enjoyed doing the wood texture with this pencil as I could work it up slowly.

Once I completed the top of the cross it made sense to do the other two arms and the small vertical that could be seen to provide something to render into.

Moving on to the hair was difficult as the reference was a composite image and the tone of the hair was close to that of the wood. I needed to add some shade to the wood to differentiate the hair a bit.

My difficulties started here with the face. I added the features early as I normally do this to avoid loosing the details as the skin is rendered. However with this image the face was in largely in shadow so the facial features seemed too strong at this stage.

After adding more tone to the face I lightened it all again and decided to added the shadow on the arm and come back to the tones of the face later.

Moving on the breasts and the ropes provided more opportunity to work on the shadow tones and try to work out how the shadows on the face would work.

I worked on the sections of skin between the rope in the same way you color abstract scribbles at school. The upper led and waist area again provided an opportunity to work with darker shadow tones.

I then went on to add the shadow tones round the legs and started to darken the facial tones again.

Finally I decided that the shadows on the face were really quite dark in the reference and were about equal to those on the arm. So I went of there whole image a few times and darkened shadows and boundaries. 

I was torn in this image between keeping the dark shadow tones from the reference and making the facial features more prominent. At the end I am not sure quite how I feel about this one, and I make come back to work on it again in the future.

So I now have had another go and re-established the shape of the eyes.