Digital painting of young beth harmon from "the queens gambit"

6 months ago

Hello everyone, how are you all today? i hope everyone is having a great day.
today i decided to make paintings from images from movies or tv shows.
i tried this kind of drawings before, the first time i did them i drew scenes from fantastic beast, i made digital painting of young dumbledore. and some other characters.
i also made two paintings from the tv show 'arcane'. i love to watch tv shows and movies and so i thought i could make this productive.
i would watch movies and tv shows and pick out reference images to draw from them, because some movies and tv shows have really great color grading and light scenarios and they make portraits look pretty amazing most of the time. But not the ones are in broad daylight, mostly the images that are in shadows look good.

However i did not follow the proper colors for this painting. the ref image was much darker but i made it much lighter, also some proportions didn't match quite right.

The tv show 'the queens gambit' is a really amazing piece of entertainment show. the show is about chess. a young girl gets in an accident and looses her parents and ends up in an orphanage. where she meets the janitor who plays chess and teaches her how to play chess.
she was already gifted in mathmetics so she picked up the game very easily and the way the first episode was made was so captivating. specially those scenes where she plays chess in her head, on the ceiling of the roof because she didn't have access to real chess pieces.

the reference image i took from the first episode of the show. she finished her exam faster than anyone else and she was sent to clean the erasers down to the basement. where she discovers the janitor playing chess by himself, he was playing both sides.

beth looks at him from a side view, there is very few light source in the basement and the portrait of beth harmon creates a really wonderful light show which is why i chose this image to draw.

process shots are below:

i started with sketching the drawing. i took the screen shot on my ipad and since ipad has this feature to use two separate software at the same time, i opened the photo on one side and procreate on the other side. its better to keep them side by side in order to draw proper proportion, although i still didn't get her likeness completely.

after the sketching was done i started to color it, as you can see the beginning of the coloring process is so much different than the final color, that is because i thought of following the real color palette which is really dark.
i did use separate layers for the hair and the skin and the cloth.
i toned down the color a little bit immediately and started to define the shadow and light shapes. at this point i was only working on the skin layer, because i was going to focus on each layer separately.

then i used some smaller brush to make some more color adjustments and draw some more details. the more i use the smaller brush the more time it takes to blend those colors together.
i did face some difficulty while coloring the eyes part because it is supposed to be really dark and i felt kind of weird coloring it that way, because if you look at my drawings, you will see that i like to use a lot of colors and glowy looking eyes.

which is why i started to add some lighter and saturated colors at this point. i thought adding some blue would look really nice because the light source is orange which is warm and blue should be looking cold, which is how the shadow should be.