Project January: The Baroness

The last few weeks I've been pressuring myself to put together a better portfolio, highlighting illustration over design and typography as there's a whole lot of Baltimore graphic artists who are better in those latter departments. But maybe they need illustration help?

Anyway, I've put about 7 hours into the drawing, 3 hours into learning some new painting skills, and another 2 in correcting stupid mistakes. It's not complete, of course, but I've worked out enough bugs in my workflow that  I can cut down the time put into getting this far. Hopefully, another 8-10 hours and I'll be totally finished (so lets add another 3 in there for revisions when I think I can do better).

What I'm going for is Cobra's intel officer, The Baroness, in all her dark, Soviet-esque spy coolness, making some sort of escape, guns blazing, on the cover of a mid-70s secret agent paperback. I'm not totally sure what the end result will be just yet: I have a few different designs sketched up, each with its own story to tell beginning with the Baroness, her expression, her pose, and the typeface. Let's look at that first.

Because nothing says this is a dangerous mission better than 'Operation: Massacre'.
Except maybe "Dangerous Mission".

The first two are golds and feel like spy science fiction, like Moonraker, so I'd add some satellites, a rocket, some cool Chesley Bonestell space stuff. The third hints at 1970s technology, with the green color of a Speak & Spell display, meaning an ICBM, a secret bunker, a briefcase maybe.  Same with the last one, which is an 'instruction booklet' sort of slab-serif with the color of old calculator numerals.

Or this bastard who haunts me to this day with his 'Math Fun".

None of the technology has been drawn up yet so we'll have a look at The Baroness herself. I drew her out, "analog", with the intention of scanning it into Illustrator, where I can straighten the lines on the guns and  smooth out some of those feminine curves.

Either I need help with perspective or she's badass enough to aim in two slightly different places.
We'll make the latter true.

This one was done in the Adam Hughes-approved Pitt pens and Copic markers. And while that's great when destined for a finished product on paper, it makes for a truly disastrous scan into Illustrator. So, lesson learned: don't shade or otherwise color a sketch if the bulk of the work is going to be painted digitally (unless someone knows a better way).

Also take note of how I obviously changed my mind at some point because some of the hair looks like it's moving with the action and some looks as though she's standing still. That's something I'll have to address at some point (+1.5 hours to correct that, I'm sure...) but I wanted to push on for now. Here's what I was left with after I deleted all the grays out:

I started with the face and hair painting first, hiding the lines you see above so I could work without the glasses in the way.

I always use a 50% gray background instead of white so I can make sure stuff like the shine on her lips are brighter white than her teeth and the "whites" of her eyes. Teeth and eyes look weird as hell when you make them white.

Again, you can see how much I'll have to correct with her non-dramatic hair. That's irritating.

In order to make this more complicated, I've got two ideas for the glasses as well:

Big 70s Glasses

Small, less distracting glasses

The glasses, by the way, were drawn in Illustrator so they'd be straighter & I could put a gradient on them. I decided to do the same for her super-spy suit:

Turns out, I can only add one gradient per shape. Makes sense. So, I use the Blob Brush to custom-create areas on different layers where other highlights should go. It should be noted that I'm just testing out whether the gradients will work for our purposes here at all; I may actually end up creating these with an airbrush instead.

Because I decided to depict her having amazing shooting abilities by aiming in two different places, I had to really lay on the perspective of her left arm by making it less transparent (appearing black rather than gray is just the effect of higher transparency on the other areas).

And here's the new areas placed over the original shape:

Those gradient areas look blocked in but that doesn't matter because I'm going to smooth out those types of separations in Photoshop anyway. Here's the suit with the face/hair layer:

All this is going over to PS so I can being painting. And that'll be what I'm writing about for next time...

EDIT:

I swear I researched this idea before I started it...

...and there's just no way I'm going to beat out The Baroness karate-chopping a Scot.