The Young Woman and the Sea depicts a character from my Heroine Rises series, Maxine Rubin staring out into the 'sea' (technically a channel but let's not get too specific here) from the roof of a building in the fishing neighborhood of Union Harbor.

This piece is one of the few that I have made using a pure digital workflow. In this post, I wanted to go over the process I went through to create the piece and talk about techniques and ideas I implemented throughout the making of The Young Woman and the Sea! Let's get started:

Overview

1. Sketching and Planning

2. Lineart

3. Base Color and Highlights

4. Base Shadows

5. Balancing Colors

6. Final Details

Sketching and Planning

The first step I always take when starting a project is to come up with a series of thumbnail sketches. These thumbnail sketches help me get a big sense of the composition and help me figure out where to make changes before I get too far into a piece and realize "Oops, maybe I should have put this here instead".

Planning and thumbnailing out your composition will save you hours of work and grief before you even start.

Once I have a thumbnail I like I go ahead and open my drawing software and begin sketching out a more detailed picture. For this piece, I decided to use different colors for different parts in order to better distinguish the elements from each other.

The sketch phase is important and I try to make sure I get as much as possible, so I can focus less on things like "the arm looks a bit too long" once I start laying down color.

Lineart

After I am happy with the sketch, I go ahead and select a hard brush that tapers with pressure. In my opinion, weighted lineart has a much more artistic appeal than lines that are all the same width. Usually when tracing a sketch, I would go ahead and use black for every line but for this piece I decided to use a saturated or darkened color of whatever part I was working on. For example, the lines on Maxine's skin are almost red in color and the lines on her hair are a very dark red.

I did this for two reasons:

1. I wanted the lineart to remain a part of the piece when color and shading was added

2. I didn't like the jarring contrast of black. Think black lines on pale skin or light hair for example.

In some other pieces, I simply painted over the lines once I was done laying down color. But I feel that the lines are lost and as I said before, I wanted to keep a subtle sense of lineart with this one.

I only traced Maxine because I figured that painting over the sketch would give the background a more 'fuzzy' feel to it in contrast to the 'sharp' and in focus Maxine.

Base Color and Highlights

Now it's time for color! For this piece, I picked out a few colors that fit the feeling of the scene I was going for. Then I lay down the base blue color that would seep into every part of the background. I decided to add highlights in this phase. Looking back on it, that decision was a mistake. It was hard to adjust later on in the piece and with no shadows, I wasn't able to effectively see where a highlight would go best.

Nonetheless, I continued to lay down colors for Maxine and once that was done, it was time for shadows.

Base Shadows

To add the shadows for the background, I painted on a layer above the base blue using different tones of grey. Once I turned on a Multiply layer, the base blue came through and helped blend the colors of the shadows with the background.

I used a chiseled and rough brush setting to make the background have a fuzzy and almost painted feeling as stated before.

Balancing Colors

With shadows, highlights, and base colors in place, it was time to balance the colors.

The light from the sun and the water is meant to reflect onto all aspects of the scene. The colors I used for Maxine will shift a bit to make it seem that she is in the scene and wasn't just copy-pasted from another image into this scene. But before I get to Maxine, I needed to do the coloring for the background. I added in the colors using the Multiply technique I mentioned before, but made sure to use some color adjustments (mostly HSL adjustment) to match them up to what the setting required.

Final Details

With everything else done, the time came to finalize the image and fix whatever needed to be fixed. Detailing usually entails adding textures or shifting colors and hues. I already did a majority of color adjustment in the previous phase but a bit more never hurts. Maxine's colors were adjusted to be warmer and they received hints of purple.

I added text where it was needed and added cracks and details to the roads and sidewalks. After doing a bit more checking over, all there's left to do is sign the piece and export it to whatever file type you need!