Amber Goes Shopping.

Wow, this one was a long time coming. I worked on this one for several weeks, off and on, over the Winter in 2005. What surprises me the most was that the original drawing was originally supposed to be this quick sketch that I did just because I had not drawn anything in a long while. But there was something there that made me keep going with it and thus it ended up becoming a big deal. This piece also became a grand experiment, not only because I tried to design a secondary outfit for Amber, but also because I tried out some new colouring techniques.

Here's a detailed look at the process.

I had this idea for Amber's new outfit for while. A track suit such as this seemed like something she'd wear. The die on her shirt came from absolutely nowhere, but was such an awesome idea that I had to go with it. What does the die represent and why is she wearing it? I'll leave that open to interpretation. So, I inked the drawing with pens and brushes, scanned it, made some minor adjustments to the line work in Photoshop, and ran it through Adobe Streamline to smoothen things out. For some reason I decided awhile back that I wasn't going to do inking anymore, but I guess I got over it enough for this special case. Then came the flat colours. At this point picking the pallet of colours I would use was very important. I didn't want to go too vibrant.

After that came the anime style cel-shaded cuts, where I sharply lay out where the highlights and shadows will be on new layers. It's not a style I enjoy working in, but I love the look of it so I'm still practicing. After this point I might usually say that I'm finished. But in this case, I went one step further and tried something new that I hadn't ever really seen before. I used gradients, erasers, and airbrushes on the cuts to create a new hybrid style that I've coined as "Brush Tones". I liked the way this turned out, so I'm going to work with this new style some more to try to perfect it.

You want to see a close up now, don't you?

You like that, huh?

The most time consuming part of this piece, by far, was the background. From drawing and redrawing in perspective to digitally painting all of the texture and detail to figuring out a way to make the windows work, an insane amount of work went into it. Now I sure didn't spend all that time and effort just to let Amber cover most of it up, so here is everything I painted on it's own.

I've never done anything this extensive for a background, so again, it was an experiment, and I'm sure that next time I do something like that, I'll be more efficient at it. The store is not based on a real store, it's just a nondescript fashionable clothing store that Amber would likely be seen hanging around. Though I did use various pictures of shops in Toronto as reference.

So that's it. Hope you enjoyed this in depth look at the girliest picture I've ever drawn. Hopefully it shows that even though I usually like to leave my drawings a bit messy and rough, I can try new styles and make something cleaner and prettier if I want to. I have to tell you though, after spending so much time on this particular piece, I'm really in the mood to draw something really dark!

© SykoGrafix Inc.

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