Lucy Hanging around process (Patreon)

Here are some behind the scenes bits from the most recent piece I did. :>

I used a reference photo of a lady dangling in a similar pose & another different photo for the feet because the lady was wearing shoes and I wanted Lucy to be barefoot. 😅

As always I did the linework first and then did the basic shading with the "I am the light source, oh and also occlusion shadows!"-approach. 😬
I'm not sure if I showed it before but here you can also see that Lucy's deep dark eyes are actually part of the linework layer. :D

After that I did a VERY rough block in of some background shapes. Because I was planning on making the background very blurry and out of focus I didn't do any sketching lines, instead I just picked some 3 colors from the reference and directly painted in some big shapes and then gradually went smaller.
As you can see I also didn't bother to paint the background behind Lucy because that would be covered up in the finished piece anyway. You can still see the very big brush strokes I mentioned.
After all the shapes were in place I did add a filter layer and set it to "Blur".

After the background was done I added a multiply layer for the shadows and dappled light. I set it up so it inherits the alpha from Lucy's body, which basically means that on that layer I can only paint ON her body, not outside of it. Then I painted in the shadows with a light warm grey (because the layer blending mode is set to multiply it appears as a darker version of the color below) and blurred the layer at some point.

To make the light areas pop a bit more I also added a color dodge layer and did some very light touchups around the edges of the shadows. You can see a faint warm glow on her leg, which is the effect of that.

At this point I'd say that I added another multiply layer and painted in a very subtle gradient around the corners of the image to achieve a vignette effect. But in the version I posted earlier I had forgotten that. 😓
This one has the vignette effect now! :S It's super subtle but I think it does add something and focuses to view nicely on the character. :>

That was me nerding about art-technicalities. :D
I hope you all have a great week! :>