'Daryl Hannah' Artwork

This is my most recent 2D artwork. It is of 'Daryl Hannah' playing her part of 'Ellie Driver' from Quentin Tarantino's 'Kill Bill' movies. This piece began as a portrait that developed into a full-body piece. Because of this, the final image is actually quite large. This gave me the opportunity to try and add some more detail which was nice, although I didn't want to overdo it.

While creating this piece I also decided to save every so often, creating an 8-stage collage of the process to give you a better idea of what I was doing. As usual, Photoshop CS6, Intuos 4 Wacom tablet, drawn directly to the computer after an initial sketch in my sketchbook.

This is the 8-stage break-down of the artworks creation. All in all it was created over three or four days after work, coming back to it, leaving it, and coming back to it many times. I'm still not 100% happy with it, and there are still areas like her hair that I most likely will lush-up a bit more before I say it really is done for portfolio use of whatever.

Although its not very easy to see the changes, there were several areas on the piece that I changed only in the painting stages that the original base sketch had wrong.

The original image is 3000 pixels tall and 2400 pixels wide, although it certainly did not start out that big. Initially it would have been something like 600x800.

This is a recolour of the artwork I did to see if it looked better, but in the end I decided the warmer colours suited it better. However the colder version does have a more clinical, cold hearted feel to it, that would have been much more suiting to the actual event that this artwork was created from in the film. Silent assassin.

A handy technique that I already knew was out there, but have only recently really found useful as part of mixing my colours was to reverse engineer the colours and tones, building up from darks to lights, instead of the other way around. I employ both methods now, partly depending on the material that I'm painting, and just as and when needed. For example her jacket was mostly painted from a mid tone base, adding shadows and highlights, but then started rebuilding the tones and colours over it again but not at 100% opacity. The results often make the surface seem much thicker and richer, and worked out to be a far superior way to incorporate light sub-surface scattering effects instead of just trying to paint it over or directly under shadow layers. <3