Shine!

What to do if you spend hours shading your goddess with colored pencils and still don't like the way she turned out? Scan her into Photoshop, put her into a cool background, embellish a little and then you won't have to throw her away! Plus, you really don't want to rip out the Moleskine paper from the journal, do you?

Ugh! I worked on this one for a long time trying to get the shading just right. I'm okay with the colors but when I was finished I stepped back and looked at her. I'm just not that into her. ;) Her proportions are all wrong, her face is too long, blah, blah, blah. So I made a digital creation with her and she's much more goddess-like placed in the heavens! I scanned her into the computer, made her a PNG file and used the Hard Light blending mode to get her to "burn" into the background. Much better. Isn't this background cool? It's from the Gloaming collection at Scrap Artist.com. Love it! Then I added a few embellishments from other digital files and voila! I can live with her in this environment.

Here she is in the bare Moleskine state:

Not too hot. I learned a lot from the mistakes of that one. This next photo is a goddess I sketched earlier. Not loving the eyes but did get some good tips from Suzi Blu about how to fix that. So I've started another one and we'll see if she turns out any better.

The best thing you can do is keep practicing and learn something from each one, I guess. Hopefully by the end of the workshop I'll have a goddess I love. The next lesson goes up tomorrow. We will be embellishing the backgrounds of our journal pages. Then in the final two weeks we work on our goddess done in graphite that I showed a while back. She is now covered with a layer of clear gesso and mounted to wood. Hopefully I won't mess her up!