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(continued)
Step One: The Basic Elements

If I was reworking from scratch the first thing I would
have done is to redraw the figure, trying to get a more
dynamic pose.
What I had in mind was a more
dynamic pose showing that she's up there really
getting into her music. There should always be
some element of dynamism in any illustration.
This is not to say that the character should be
in motion but the character should look and feel
alive.
I cannot stress it enough:
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The head
and facial details should be the last step of the drawing
process. |
Amateur artists are easy to pick out—all you need to
do is look at the face then the rest of the image as
separate pieces and you'll see that the amateur puts more
work into the face than the rest. When drawing any human
or other living character (or a close facsimile) the body
position and pose must be determined first.
In the retouch I decided to work
backwards from the head down though because I felt the
head needed the most work.
Step Two: Isolate and Fix the Various Problem Areas

I scaled the image up to about twice the original size so
that I could have a larger area to work with and shrink
it down later. (Art always looks better shrunken down.)
Then I copied the body layer multiple times so that I
could isolate the different elements. I ended up with
separate layers for the background, mouth, eyes,
eyebrows, hair, nose, neck, body, right arm and collar. Each one of these would get a separate layer or
two for shadows, highlights and other enhancements. I
take this approach because it's akin to cels which is
still the easiest way for my brain to handle things. If I
was doing a watercolor style illo I would probably only
have 2 levels, the character and the background.
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