I expanded the background with the same cloudy sorta technique I had used around the head. I was very influenced by Christophe Vacher in selecting the wing type for him. I wanted the wings to have little volume...in the sense of how thick and weighty they were, so they needed to be transparent.

If you want to make transparent or translucent figures, I suggest painting on a space lighter than your background colour - like the grey that I have chosen here. Almost every layer from this point on was blended in over the grey at about 70% opacity, that way the grey still shows up through the other layers.

Another way of doing this is to do it -after- you paint the figure, however this way you can allow for lighting etc, and THAT way you may find yourself going back over things to correct a few technical glitches such as, yeah lighting, or depth.

There are a few other ways I have found to do this, but I'm in danger of rambling, so I'll continue here.



I can't remember the technical term right now, but on spaces with heavy shadow, I find it is useful to paint negatively, or subtractively. Paint by shadows, not by light - and this is what I am beginning to do here. AHA! See, I am also thinking about rocks. It's not a good idea to paint a scene figure first like this, but in this case the image sort of grew. Usually it is best to paint background-first. Maybe we will talk about that later? You know, ultimately I dont really think there is a right and wrong, if you can PULL IT OFF.



Here I have gone over everything with a small smudge brush, to smooth lines and shadows.



I find it useful to give myself guidelines on a layer -underneath- the one I am working on, so that I can lower or raise the transparency of it in order to see where I want to paint next. I really should have saved a more impressive-looking stage :) but anyway......

Retouching Drawings Part 6