Lucy Westenra WIPs (Patreon)

Progress pics of my final prize art for @captainnowhere, who requested Lucy Westenra from the 1992 Dracula film. I'm honestly surprised I hadn't discovered this character sooner - her design is kind of busy but overall totally my taste.

Though with all the details, this is a much more time-intensive portrait than I thought it was going to be...so there's going to be a lot more steps!

Here's the original inspo. Some of the details are hard to make out, so I'll be winging it but will try to get as close as I can to the original.

Sketching the pose out.

Lining the face + mocking up the lace headdress and collar - I used the Perspective tool for the collar, which gave me an idea (see the WIP after the next one).

Lining the headdress - switched the bg color to a darker one because I knew this would look better and more meshlike with white outlines.

I drew one "petal" of the collar then pasted it in a circle. With a full circle, it's easier for me to change the perspective to whatever I want using Perspective and Mesh Transformation tools in CSP.

Final lineart, with all the lace details. The colors and borders are just a placeholder for now so that I can actually see what's going on. 

Started to shade the sleeves and dress in a painterly style. I spent a while trying to get the colors right and liked how this was looking until...

I realized the sleeves were supposed to be translucent like the headdress -_- 

So I redid the flats on the sleeves to make them translucent, and I'll have to draw arms underneath. I feel like the rendering on the opaque gloves and dress feels out of place with how flat the transparent mesh looks, so I'll probably add some "white shadows" to the mesh to try and make it cohesive. 

(Side note: for a portrait this is starting to take a lot of time. The requester is very lucky that I enjoy this design.)

Added "shading" to the white mesh and it feels more complete, I think. I worry that all these details makes her look overrendered, but I'm going to stop worrying about it because this was supposed to be a small project lol. (That said, I'm always open to feedback from others - just need to stop self-scrutinizing so hard) Also made her face paler thanks to Greg's suggestion in the comments, and adjusted the bg colors as well.

I think she's pretty much done! I'll probably do small touch-ups over the next few days as I notice them.

I've also changed the WIP post layout a bit so it's easier to show all my progress and notes side by side. Will share my latest WIPs as the main photo!