ROUGHS & CONCEPTS, LIGHTING IN BRYCE,

THE HAIR, THE DRESS, THE FIGURE, THE FINAL IMAGE

Painting the Dress
The dress, like the hair, was painted with a Wacom Tablet in Painter. Fabric folds can be very difficult.

To make it easier on myself, I try and break the shading down into three (light, medium and dark) colors and paint the entire fabric with only these colors. I can add subtle shades later. This forces me to simplify the shades and concentrate on the structure of the fabric.

From my pile of cool reference images I've been collecting for years I pulled three pictures of flowing fabric that would make up the folds of the dress. Some of the folds in the reference images actually worked with each other and the rest I had to invent.

I painted the dress with the Fine bush and the airbrush. As with the hair, the Just Add Water brush is a great tool to soften areas and push color around. Some areas were almost like finger painting as I dragged highlighted areas around.

As in the chapter about lighting, the shadow areas needed life too to keep them from becoming too flat. You now have the folds painted (I know, easier said than done) and it's time to add the pattern.

The pattern is actually added using the airbrush set to "clone" instead of "cover". I lightened up a Painter preset pattern so the swirls were almost white and the background was a medium blue and then saved it in Patterns pallet. With the new patterned selected, I then cloned (painted) on the pattern using the airbrush. If you'll notice, I cloned the pattern on the lighter areas of the dress stronger than the shadow areas. This let the folds of the dress show through while giving the fabric a silvery shine.

proceed to THE FIGURE