New 2D Artworks

These are two more pieces that I created recently. The first is of a friend, the second is of Lucy Liu, although I'm not as happy with that one: I spent far less time than usual on it, and eventually gave up trying to liquefy  filter her face to the seventh circle of hell....

Both drawn directly to the computer in Photoshop CS6 using an Intuos 4 Wacom Tablet.

On the upside, I have started to get a better workflow going for mixing the colours with more ease. I've also been going back to some basics of colour theory and techniques to draw attention by not unnecessarily adding details where they are not needed. The advantage of this means that parts of the artworks that might have taken ages to produce properly can be overlooked, while focusing more attention on areas of interest. The downside is the opposite side of the first point; some areas that I think would look nice fully rendered are overlooked to help the artwork as a whole.

This piece had far less time taken on it than the other images. In fact it was done in one sitting in a few hours at night. Something that I have learned not long ago was that I should take breaks during my work to refresh my perspective on what I'm looking at when I come back to it, even if these breaks are only for 10 minuets. Previously I often tried to get things done all in one go simply because I was enjoying it so much and just wanted to see the final product, but I miss a lot when doing this.

Her right shoulder looks off although her base suggested it was technically right. I think maybe her arm itself is to blame more than the angle of the shoulder, but either way it bugs me. To fix it properly I should have taken the time to do the pose in front of a mirror to get a better 3-dimensional understanding of what was going on. Her eyes are both right as far as I could test from the reference, but they look strange together for some reason; if I blank out one half of her face, she looks right to me. I guess the biggest reason for this image not looking so right is that I lack the understanding of why it looks wrong. Therefore I find it hard to correct. More time was surely needed to address these issues appropriately.