A Character in Search of a Setting (Patreon)

I've been wanting to put together more drawing/painting and photography and I have a bunch of selfies I took last year, where I wasn't wearing clothes because I couldn't be bothered to figure out an outfit. So I decided to draw a fantasy outfit.
I started by pulling together whatever jumped out at me from my "Costume Ideas" pintrest board (which has over a thousand pins!)



And then I drew and painted a costume to photoshop onto one of my photos and looked for a background.

I have a hard time telling stories with visual art. I can start with an image in my head, and usually that has a story. But then I try to actually draw it and...fail.


Working backward like this is...easier to draw, but harder to find a story. I just had to flail around looking for one.

I quickly figured out that a regular photo wasn't really going to work so I started messing around with wacky color grading and such.





Then I remembered  this watercolor I did of Prague.

I liked it but wanted something a bit more gritty. I threw on some gritty textures to see if it worked.

Getting there.

I was going to just add more detail to the original painting but I couldn't find it. So I took that opportunity to alter the image more, and make myself draw a cityscape. They're kinda scary because they're mostly straight lines but you don't want to just draw a bunch of boxes. I also added a chainlink fence and tried to recreate the vine tangle from the pink and gold photo above.

Turns out chainlink is very hard to draw. Especially in perspective. But that wasn't the focus of the piece so I tried not to drive myself too crazy. The city turned out to be kinda fun, though wildly time consuming. I tried to pull from as many different references as I could and worked really hard to make it the *right* amount of detailed.

After putting in all that work, adding the vine tangle took a leap of faith. I'm not terribly good at faith so I took a photo first.




Then I went to town with a brush pen, two widths of microns, and some white ink.




It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

Then I added my lady and went to work on making the clothes conform to her body. And then making the whole figure look like it had the same lighting as the background.

I hadn't retouched the background yet because it takes forever to load onto my desktop Lightroom and I was anxious to see how it looked.

I finally got the full background photo and started on the finishing touches.

I feel like it doesn't look that different. But somehow it took the better part of a day. Hopefully it's more obvious in the larger version. Still, I think it does look like a more cohesive piece. 

Does it tell a story? I'm not sure. But it *does* look like a glimpse into a different world, which is what I want most of my art to be.