Baroness: Flesh-tones and Shadows

I've worked on this a little but I think I pretty much left off with this, which is kinda cool in its own right:

Cool in, like, 2002. If I were more hipster, I'd stop now and put this on a t-shirt.

One difference between this and the last image (besides her glasses, which I'm working with separately) is her suit is less shiny and more like a modern wet-suit; I did that by making the highlight vectors into a "Multiply" layer over the flat black layer. That's okay because I'm going to go back in and shine up the armor plates with an airbrush. What I'm trying to get right now is her face and hands: the flesh tones.

Who have some great album art

I've got two ways of doing this. Sometimes, if there's a lot of skin showing, I color the whole thing gray and shade over it using white. That way I can really see the values, plus, that's sort of just how I learned to draw was with just a pencil, so I'm used to how gray looks when shading.

In the case of my Poison Ivy, the only image I have saved is the flat green. But pretend it's gray...

So I had the first image in gray and painted over it using white, which I isolated just so you can see it. Once my values were correct, I turned the gray (first) image green (or some more human flesh color for another design) and duplicated that layer and set the duplicate to "Multiply". What that does is make the white layer burn into a highlighted value of that base flesh color. That's how you get those nice shadows.

I should make it clear that I have to do a few small test areas for each project to wrap my head around this concept; I'm not naturally wired to think this way. Because this is Crazy-Think.

Now that I've said all that: I didn't do this for our Baroness. I just went right in.

The reason I brought the whole shading-on-gray thing is because that's what I've decided I have to do for her spy-suit and it'll be an experiment that I'm hoping doesn't set me back too many hours but it will.

It always will. Better now than on a project I'm getting paid for, I suppose...

But let's knock out those glasses.

I went with the larger ones. I mean, it's what she's known for. Plus, the design is a 1970s spy thriller. The only people who wore narrow glasses in the 70s was your grandfather when he got ready to show you something scientific that you already knew. 

If you look at the right side of the glasses in the above image, you can (barely) see that they look pasted on because they totally are. I imported them from Illustrator and the branch is cut to what should be behind her hair. 

So I cut that part out and pasted it above the branch. Then...

I added a bit of a glow to the lenses and some shadow to the frames and also up by her forehead.

Then, I went downstairs to get another beer (Baltimore's own Resurrection Ale) and when I came back up I noticed a few things wrong. The glare on her glasses wasn't right with the light source and there was too much disruption in the lenses: I worked too hard on the way the eyes look to cover them up that much.

While I was correcting the light, I went ahead and added some crimson onto her cheeks to give her an additional subtlety to her expression. Then I cut her hair to shoulder length which has he added bonus of not forcing me to re-create some dynamic action where I didn't want it. Sometimes, physics itself is a limitation and you can work with it but I wasn't feeling it here. I may change my mind before the end but she looks really where I want her right now.

Notice that although I cut the length, I still had to actually add to the left side because if her hair is shorter, it'd bunch up as she raises her shoulder.

I'm going back in to do the hands now but we'll see that next time as I tackle that suit and the guns. I'll leave you with another one of these fancy book covers that I can never hope to equal. 

Is her preference of her men being one hundred proof 70s slang or does she like them drunk?
Those f'n dogs are drunk.