Thomgirl's Digital Ruminations

Not sure how sold I am on the background and of course the first set up of color always looks like a mess A lot of work to go, but making time for it as I can

Impressive start with the colour, that glow looks really intense.
Painting skin tones right next to a bright backlight can be tricky but you've already got a really good base to build on and all the hues are warmly balanced.
Looking forward to more.

Coming along nicely. I like the BG, and look forward to seeing it progress. ... I've actually been wanting to work on a close up/portrait to work on skin tones myself. So will be watching how you tackle it.

Nice progression girl ! I can see extreme bright lighting on the left side of her face and really dark on the other side, I think that lighting setup would look awesome with her fierceness, The color choices are perfect so far, I guess you could look into the Swatchoos 1.0 beta for some ahh better color picker techniques

Can't wait to see her all done!

Thanks for all the kind words, guys! Life got hectic again and to be fair I just wasn't feeling sold on what I had done before. I really wanted to push bolder soo... I scraped what I did before for color and changed up the pallet. The wings WILL come back, don't worry, but sorting out the skin for the time being. I feel almost bad now though for scrapping it with all the kind support from everyone! I think I'm my own worst critic Anyways, I'm feeling much more excited about this version and I hope you guys like it too.

I did like the previous one but it's OK because this one looks good too. There's more than one way to do a great painting.
The complementary blue/orange combo always looks vibrant and the backlit hair enhances this too. Also the skin has a lot more warmth in this version which gives a bit more life to the character.
Keep going!

I think this new one is a big improvement. The palette has much nice contrast, and the value is much cleaner. Before you go in and add bits of colors in detail, you might want to establish the overall values more; it will save you a lot of time and headache later on.

I.... wow... not even sure where to start. First off, I've been out of commission from even doing much art for quite some time. In May, my beloved Macbook Pro kicked the bucket. Around the same time, my husband got a new job and we moved once more across part of the US, but this time to actually lay down roots. Hopefully, no more moves for a very long time. Between selling our previous home, renting for a while at our new town while we looked for a permanent home, then moving into that, tending to new home stuff, getting a couple horses and a new dog not to mention all the things that come with a kiddo going from 2 to 3, I just couldn't justify dealing with the expense of a new mac and all that was going to entail.

I will try to keep this short. Recently, I just couldn't take it any more. I had to get something set up again to do my artwork. Keeping up with a Mac is just too expensive and I do have a phenominal home built PC. Unfortunately, my copy of PS CS6 is for Mac. A new copy of CS6 is... well, VERY expensive anymore. I also cannot justify their new subscription model. After 3 years, I will have paid more than what they used to sell the program for brand new when it was stand alone. So after some research I decided to move over to using Corel Painter 2018 and I must say 'WOW'! I have just sat down this morning to play with it and churned out a sketch of a character that I have been trying to really nail down in how she looks in my mind for, oh... 5 years or more. I am really looking forward to what this program has to offer and quite pleased with the initial sketch results. I felt like I was almost actually sketching with a pencil except I had all the tools that make changing things around so nice in a digital medium.

Fear not though, I have not forgotten my other WIPs from Photoshop. My work was all salvaged from my dead Mac, but I do have to spend time getting it all transferred from it to my PC. It's a matter of setting up externals, but I just didn't feel like messing with it today.

Hope everyone is doing well and looking forward to getting back into the swing of things around here!

Good to see you on the forum again!
And good to know you found a new program you like. If you want to try anything else I use ArtRage which is fairly cheap (very cheap compared to the pricey ones) or Krita which is free. I still haven't managed to learn krita very well, myself, though :p But it is good and versatile for a free program