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5. More Body and Some Clouds

In this part I basically kept working on the body until it looked more or less finished. Added the tubes down there to keep the eye from going off the page, as along with the arm and the line on the hips it leads your attention back to the dolphin. At this stage it is also more-or-less apparent that I added the lighter edges around round objects that I mentioned way back there. Not so easy to spot at this size, but they are all along the arms and the back, to name a few. The ambient light pops up on the hands and the back once again. It’s just really handy to add some eerie feeling and sense of volume. Also note that the contrast is higher on the wires closer to the dolphin, and dimmer further apart. The point of this is to enforce the focus on the little dolphin and its interaction with the child, and it also makes sense if you look at all the clouds that are forming around the child – the air ought to be quite misty, so things would look more faded out further away from the lightsource.

Talking of clouds, I started defining them at this stage. I decided to shape them in a slightly circular manner, pointing to the dolphin. It looks a little cliché at this point, but I was going to add more pizzazz over the area where the clouds currently are later on, so the movement would become less noticeable eventually. I had them adhere to the lighting on the child and dolphin to a certain extent, because it helped to keep it all together and also created more suspense. The exact technique of painting the clouds involves first laying down the colors with a brush, and then blending them with the grainy water, moving the brush in circles, going from large (with large brush size) at first, to small (with correspondingly smaller brush size) as they became more detailed. I find that randomness is your best friend when drawing clouds, so it’s a good idea to let yourself make some deliberate ‘mistakes’ to break up the shapes and make them more life-like.

Oh and look, a third eye popped open on the child’s forehead – it was so bare and lonely it just needed something. It was also interesting to shade an eye when turned at such an unusual angle. It was shaded just like the other two eyes, only with flesh-tone highlights around the edge. Later on I added some light yellow to these particular highlights. Light yellow is much better than white for this sort of thing, because it pops out more – warm tones tend to appear closer to the viewer than cool or neutral ones.



Back to Lighting Magic: The Dolphin
Back to Lighting magic - part four
On to Lighting magic - part six