Assignment 3 - Interpreting a Quote (Variation 2)
Variation 2
“Not all Who Wander are Lost”
This is my second variation image based on the quote "Not All Who Wander Are Lost" by J. R. R. Tolkien. I continued to use the custom wet brush (learned a Youtube tutorial by Davey Baker) and I also used a variation of the Texture Pour brush for the moss and the Soaking Rain brush to add texture to the entire piece.
My main focus for this variation was to fix the composition, the moss and to improve the look of the lighting. To fix the composition, I cropped the image to better focus on the tiger and moved the side branch and upper branch around to better frame the image. I wanted a softer, more textured look to the moss so I used Texture Pour brush with adjusted color jitter to paint the new moss. I also wanted to make it look like there is light coming through the branches of the jungle so I added dappled lighting to the middle branch and the tiger. I watched a video by Aaron Blaise on dappled lighting for inspiration. Mine didn’t turn out as well as his but I’m still pretty happy with it.
I noticed that the ears were too small and the nose was too high on her face so I fixed those features. I also did some general refining on the tiger and I increased the contrast so the forms would be easier to read. I also gave her some subtle silver stripes.
Towards the end of working on this variation, I started playing with some random brushes to see if I could find anything that would work well for this drawing. While testing brushes, I found the Soaking brush under the Rain category and I absolutely loved the texture of it. I started painting over the entire canvas to play around with the brush and then on a whim I set that layer as an overlay and I was amazed at how much I liked the resulting texture so I decided to keep it.
Originally, I was planning on having a plethora of foliage attached to the branches (mainly ferns and/or bromeliads) but I was having trouble getting them to look the way I wanted so I decided to leave them out for now; maybe I will revisit that in a future variation.
