Valentine's Day Gown
This tutorial was written in Adobe Photoshop CS4.
It's likely this can be pretty easily translated into your graphic program of choice provided it offers layers.
Today I am going to show you how I created the doll below. I used the base I created from the Freestyle Base tutorial. This is a great way to use the base you create from that tutorial as well =) I just loved the gown that Natalie Portman wore to the 2011 Golden Globe awards. It was so feminine and soft and put me in a Valentine's mood =) And since it's almost Valentine's day I made a few changes for a lovely Vday Gown! As usual, please don't remove my Valentine's Gown doll below and don't replicate it pixel for pixel. Your end result should be uniquely yours =)
First things first! I use the brush in Photoshop to draw a rough sketch of how I wanted the dress to look. Notice that I did not draw in the heart just yet. It is better to start with a simple foundation and work the details in later.
Then I created a new layer and sketched in a fun, but elegant updo. I would've liked to see more going on with Natalie's hair at the Golden Globes honestly but she seldoms does big glam hair now that I think of it.
And on a new layer, add a necklace (and/or a bracelet, some earrings, etc..)
So I can see the heart embellishment, I lightened up and recolored my outline of the dress. It doesn't matter what I do to it since I'll be tracing it over later in "pixels". Then I added the heart embellishment.
On a new layer, I start tracing the dress with the pencil tool. The pencil tool creates "pixel lines" as opposed to the soft, anti-aliased lines you get with the brush tools. When you are creating dolls with no background it's important to make the outlines pixeled since anti-alias lines do not handle transparency well. Below you see the outline over the sketch and then how it looks once I hide the sketch layer.
Repeated for the heart, on a new layer.
And the same for the hair. Don't feel compelled to pixel all the little details inside the hair. You can go back in later with the brush and get more natural lines and you don't want to get weighed down in the tediousness of pixeling the details at this point. It will just slow you down and limit the flow of all that right brained creativity you've got going on.
I do the same for her jewelery.
Now I go in and recolor and fill all my outlines.
Here is where I begin shading in the dress with the brush tool. I duplicated the dress layer, selected the fill color with the wand tool and started shading from there. I try to make the dress drape and fold in as natural way as possible which takes some thought since it's different for every dress and base. I felt like the outline color I was using was too dark, so I lightened it up a bit. Then I went in and adjusted the brightness/contrast filter on the dress to get a good bright color on the whole dress.
Here I've worked on the heart, adding tiny bright spots to create a sparkly effect. I also played with the brightness/contrast filter for the heart.
For the hair I duplicated the hair layer, selected the fill color with the wand tool then started giving the hair depth and form with darker shades for shadows and lighter shades for highlights. Placing shadow and light really varies from style to style but it's good to consider where the light is coming from as well as where one section of hair meets another.
Here I've started working on the necklace. I recolored it and brightened it up a bit to make it stand out a little more.
But it still didn't feel like enough so I brightened it up a bit more. The shape also did not feel right to me so I edited that a bit as well before adding an earring.
Now I've added make up to her cheeks and eyes to add a little more glam to the overall look. I also decided to slip a diamond ring on her finger =)
I hope you enjoyed the tutorial!
~Link Hearts Enchanted~
Links are definitely appreciated! Please feel free to right click to save one of these images to your hard drive and link them back to:
http://www.heartsenchanted.com
Thanks for your support!
