Portrait of a vampress

I did this one way back in July but held off posting it until now (I couldn't wait until Halloween which is in a few days...lol). So at that time I wrote this description in anticipation of when I'd be able to submitt it. So...the following comments where written in July/August. Just so you know.



Phew! This one has sent me on one hellva ride.
I've never worked so hard on any digi painting before, nor have I done any real airbrushing in anything I've made. The digit paintings I've done before this were more flat and looked like cell coloring with no shading or highlights.

This one was my first attempt at shading, airbrushing, highlights...the whole enchilada. Granted I still held on to some of the heavy lines but it was a first step.

Ok explaination time.
This is a Fanart piece of vampress from vampress.net. There's a contest going on in a neopets guild I'm in and one of the catergories (of 2) that you can enter in is to create a piece of vampress.net fanart, any medium. So natrually I dived head first into digital painting not only because it seemed like fun but also to improve my digital painting skills.

If you don't know who vampress is...go to her site now: [link]

I used one of her pictures as reference. You can find it here: [link]

To see more photo's of vampress go here: [link]

This will also end up going on her site on the fanart page.

Also I made sure to get full permission from vampress herself to put this up because I did use her photo as reference. I even put her copyright with mine on the image itself.

I used a black and white photo as reference and added color to the lips and eyes to accentuate the vampire element.

Special note: I'm actually partially in this picture. Before I started on this contest entry I was trying to make a few brushes of my own. I used a picture of myself as a test brush and I ended up needing something as a background in this. Everything I tried didn't work, until that is I got out the brush of myself. Now you can't see my face at all but if you notice any triangles in there (there's at least one red one on the left side of her head)...those triangles are my neck...formed by the shadow under my chin and the v neck of my jacket. I just stamped myself all over the background in a few layers, blurred and erased until I got what I wanted.

And it's 1024 x 768 for handy wallpaper useage.