"Orange Fire" 2018
Part 3 - Orange Fire
I wanted to practice lighting effects, thin digital inking, and texture rendering from a flat hue (as opposed to my usual method of overlaying a color layer over monochrome), so to accomplish this, I created the Saber Series: illustrations of Star Wars-inspired black warriors of various moral alignments and armed with unique lightsabers.
To begin the series, I created 12 sketches (6 male & 6 female) and assigned good and evil alignments. I choose this pose and outfit for the evil female character.
In Corel Painter, the contour lines were drawn with the Sharp Colored Pencil tool and then set to Multiply blending mode, and a layer for color was set underneath. Starting with the skin (the most underlying layer of any character), I used the Detail Airbrush, Just Add Water, and Digital Soft Velocity Airbrush. They work really well with smoothing skin in conjunction with the Grainy Water blender. The lipstick was textured with rapid strokes of the Just Add Water tool.
The clothes, weapon, and then hair were rendered in order, mostly ignoring details that the lightsaber's blade will cover. The metallic textures were created with multiple strokes of varying saturations and shades and/or rapid strokes of blender tools.
I wanted to have a rough, defined texture to her curls, so I meticulously drew short lines throughout the dreads. Once the color layer is completed and minor corrections made, I used a layer mask to remove excess. From here, the file was transferred to Photoshop.
The Burn and Dodge tools enhance the contrast and saturation of certain areas of the character. A separate layer is created for the light blade, which is pure #FFFFFF white with a subtle white Outer Glow effect, flattened to add an orange Outer Glow effect, and then overlaid with stylized brush set to the Vivid Light blending option for the fire effect. A layer with the Linear Light blending option is drawn with the same orange for reflecting off of the character. The background was rendered with a variety of gradient layers, textured brushes, and layer styles, appropriately blurred to distance with smart objects and the Gaussian Blur filter.
Finally, the character is turned into a Smart Object with a Gaussian Blur filter applied. To limit its strength, I painted particular areas with a mask. The entire image is then tilted and cropped for effect.
Some minor graphic design is added to create the final poster, available in the Life Forever Shop.
© DeForrest / Life Forever
