In 2009 I was commissioned to illustrate a new superhero character. She was suppose to be modeled like Rapunzel, Sailor Moon, and a girl that the commissioner was going to give this illustrate to as a gift. This made for a pretty special present and she loved it very much!

The Line Art

I don't believe I still have the original pencil drawing for this one, so all I can start with is the line art. In 2009 I was illustrating on my desktop computer using the Wacom Bamboo Fun drawing tablet and Corel Painter Essentials, which came bundled with the peripheral. I am pleased that I was able to illustrate the character's face to resemble the girl in the reference photo I was using.

The Flat Colors

The colors were not specified in the commission, so I was the one to decide. I thought a subdued purple would go well with warm sunset background. Purple is a color of royalty, and Rapunzel is a princess, no? When coloring this piece, I used both Corel Painter Essentials and Adobe Photoshop CS5.

The Finished Illustration

It was important to show her using some sort of superpowers, so I used Adobe Photoshop to create some concentrated lens flares and the liquify tool to drag and create the shapes for each flare. Setting this layer to overlay makes it shine bright. If I could go back and do it again, I would manually paint the clouds in the background. I was too lazy at the time and I used Adobe's built-in cloud filter, which looks pretty bland.