Drawitbetter Contest #4: My Entry

Hello everyone!

I am here with an entry for @sirsensei 's awesome art contest, the theme being trees!

I took it in a little bit of a different direction and decided to draw a tree nymph instead! I felt like drawing something sultry and mythical that still followed the theme. So hopefully that still counts. Lol.

Now for the process:

First I start out with a sketch which I sloppily just kind of draw at first and then I go over it again with another layer to try to smooth the lines out to make them not look so horrific. XD

And once that is done I lay down some flat colour. Just basic shades that aren't too dark or too light because the highlights and shadows will come next! :D

And here is where I roughly lay down where the first round of shadows and highlights go. I use a hard brush because I find that when you blend them later they leave a bit of texture behind instead of making everything look so airbrushed.

And you can see I took a softer brush here and just kind of blended the shadows and the highlights out until everything looked rather smooth. Still keeping the lines harsh where the ridges of the bark and whatever else is supposed to be.

And now I went over it again with a darker shadow still and refined the edges and the places where the darkest shadows would go as well as began to fill in details of her eyes and the shading of her hair. As well as placing some brighter highlights with rim lighting would be!

And I forgot to save another picture after that but basically you just start making your leaves using different shades of green and a bristly brush, just moving them over the branches at the top of her crown and elbows. And also as I go along I adjust the contrast and brightness and saturation as I see fit. I didnt want it too bright or too pigmented this time around because my background is rather dull and grey so I wanted to fit the mood. :D

God, I don't do these step by step things nearly as much as I should. Lol. But yeah just play around with it and see what you like best! :D

Anyways! Here is my entry! I hope you like it!

Until next time!

-Chelsea