The Woman of Silk and Steel
(January 2003; sketched on paper, painted in Painter Classic)
I've had Painter Classic for quite a long time, but I hadn't really used it much because it doesn't support layers, and my constant work in PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro had utterly spoiled me to layers. After seeing some extraordinarily beautiful art done in Painter (usually higher versions than Classic, but most done with only a small number of layers), I resolved to force myself back to my roots, back to the time before I even knew what layers in paint programs were. I realized I was too dependant on them, and I need to branch out and force myself to work in a single layer.
So I scratched up an old sketch (I'd done a complete digital painting based on this sketch before, but mercifully it was lost in a hard drive crash a while back...I never was particularly happy with it in the first place) and went to work. This was done entirely with the watercolour tool in Painter Classic (except for the curly gold details on the dress and the diamond-pattern details on the trim, which were added afterward in Photoshop).
When I first sketched this in about 1999 or so, I wanted to depict the duality of feminine nature--both beautifully nurturing and hard and war-like. Though the curly designs on the dress and the diamond design on the trim were conceptualized as I was painting this version, I wanted to bring this duality into these details, with flowing, gentle curves and decisive, strong angles.
I was also working on my use of colour as shadow in this--I'm one of those poor souls that too often simply uses a darker version of a colour as a shadow for that colour, which results in flatly uninteresting art with very divided, non-interacting colours. I'm proud to say I didn't use black in any form on this piece (except for the base linework), and I even made a point to do the silver of the sword without any sort of grey (which presented a bit of a connundrum for me in the beginning).
I didn't follow the technical guideline of shading with a complementray colour (else I would have used more of a bluish colour to shade the skin rather than greenish, or even a purplish colour based on the implication of pale yellow light); instead, I tried to go with my instinct about what looked interesting, and I tried to keep the colours interactive with each other.
The version of this painting that is available for print is an alternate version I created exclusively for Ellen Million Graphics and features an Art Neuveau-like scrolled border along either side. You may view the alternate version here if you like: The Woman of Silk and Steel (scrolled vertical border).
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