Using an FX Layer Stack for Faux-Infrared Imaging

In my last post I introduced the FX Layer Stack and the basics of how to implement it. Now I’d like to show you another way to use it. To review in a nutshell: you’ll have a group that contains, from bottom to top, a solid black fill layer, one or more blank layers for art, and a gradient map starting on black. The group is set to Screen blending mode.

The most obvious use of the FX Layer Stack is to illuminate objects. The flexibility of the effect allows you to create a compelling light source as well as reflections and rim lighting. You can use also it to create color fluctuations that would otherwise be tedious to do by hand. Right now we’re going to use it to make a faux thermal image.

I’ve actually developed two gradients for this purpose: one is a basic “thermal imager” variation built on a Roy G. Biv spectrum; the second is a FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) version that I got by sampling colors from real FLIR images online. I’m going to use the FLIR gradient for this image.

As I told you before, the gradient used for mapping needs to start on pure black (#000000) for the group to work right. But after that you can go on to any color combinations you can think of. Here, the FLIR gradient used for mapping has eight stops on it that I sampled from real thermal images from the web. I highly recommend sampling and building your own gradients as this will give you a lot of insight into how these colors all work together.

For this exercise, I made a simple composition…just a quick 3D render in Daz Studio with a little post work in Photoshop. I intentionally wanted the subject to be mostly obscured by shadow so that the FLIR image could reveal more detail. Although this image alone would make a swell illustration, it’s going to really come alive in the FLIR version.

Now we go through a few steps to process the image….

ONE: Desaturate the image. In this particular piece, the background needs to remain “cooler” than the subject. That translates to darker values so that it picks up the cool colors–blue and violet–from the gradient map. Concurrently, all the warm areas need lightening up so that they pick up the warmer colors. The parts of the figure in shadow also wouldn’t be so stark on the thermal image so those had to be balanced out too. In this stage I also concentrate on things like the gun she’s holding, to make it seem hot as if it had just been fired. That’s a nifty detail you wouldn’t be able to convey so well in the standard version of the image.

TWO: Make appropriate adjustments. Don’t make the mistake of just stuffing the greyscale image into the middle of the FX stack and calling it good. It rarely looks just right from the get go. For this image I used a Levels adjustment to bring out some contrast. I then ran it through Topaz Labs’ Topaz Adjust filter on the “Sketch” setting. I went in and did a good solid hour of work with the Dodge and Burn tools, and the Brush tool, to massage things by hand into what I wanted. Finally, I took regular paint brushes, both hard and soft, and used 50% grey to surgically fix spots I wanted to look a certain way. The point is that the gradient map will do the major work of coloring, but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. You’re going to need to get in there and mold the result to make a compelling image.

On the upside, though, since the base image is converted to grayscale, it’s very straightforward to work on. Toggling the gradient map on and off allows you to see the piece in its greyscale values and make better determinations about what needs to be darker and what needs to be lightened up. Sometimes colors can fool you.

Side note: a lot of digital artists recommend using greyscale to create compositions. Some artists compose almost entirely in greyscale to get the values right before they color anything. Some toggle an adjustment layer that desaturates their whole piece to check values while they work. Revered concept art teacher Feng Zhu composes almost entirely in greyscale, and he teaches that getting the values to all work together has to be in place before considering color.

Using the FX stack method for these effects is also more detailed and easy to control. This effect could be done by just placing the gradient map at the top of the art without using the group on Screen mode, like I recommend. However I tried it both ways on this very image and there IS a difference. Having only a map at the top looks ok, but *just* ok; it doesn’t respond to editing as well. Using the FX Layer stack like I’ve shown you gives you better color depth and much better control over the whole effect.

To finish off the image I gave it a slight gaussian blur. If you look at real FLIR images you can see that the camera’s not intended to be high definition; it’s just meant to translate energy into color. Blurring my image actually makes a more convincing fake. Finally, I put some HUD elements in the stack and a dark vignette to make it look like we’re really looking through an imaging apparatus.

Just for giggles, here’s the image using the other thermal gradient map.

This one uses eight stops like the FLIR version, and employs a reversed Roy G. Biv spectrum. The result looks pretty cool too, and this is more of the traditional “thermal” imaging we’re used to seeing. Either version would be suitable for whatever illustrative needs one may have.

Hopefully this will get you thinking of other things you can do with the FX Layer Stack. If you come up with something cool, I would love to see it!

CHEERS!

Skills Learned from Drawing (and Balancing it All, with Tutorial)

If you go through forums and ebooks for freelancers and designers there’s always someone who’s asking if they need to be able to draw to be a good designer. The response is always essentially “no, but it helps.” Being someone who’s been drawing his whole life I see this principle clearly. The things I understand and execute as an artist I think make my designs better. Of course this depends on where a design project is at on the spectrum. A flat logotype won’t require the same amount of “artistic” acumen that a gig poster may, and even a gig poster won’t need as much as a portrait.

Knowing how to draw doesn’t necessarily always mean being a great figure artist. While that is a powerful skill to have, just having a deeper understanding of how to make two dimensional shapes appear three dimensional without automating the process is, in my opinion, an even more crucial ability to have. One should understand how light and shadow work on objects, and on the surroundings. One should learn how to draw or paint shadows and reflections, and study how these change depending on the surfaces in question.

There are a lot of features included in graphics apps that will supposedly do much of this work. From layer styles in Photoshop to lighting a 3D model it’s possible to create decently convincing pieces from clicks and dialogue boxes. I still advocate, though, that having that deeper understanding from drawing will allow the designer+illustrator the ability to visualize what he or she wants, to view the results critically, and to devise an approach to create what they want rather than what they were given by the software. It is through this process that one can create something better, I believe.

Right now the “long shadow” look is trendy for icons and typography. Any Jack-ass can slap a drop shadow from a built-in feature of their graphics app, but in many cases that’s not going to push it past mediocrity. Good designers will go create the shadows and the supporting elements by hand.

Here’s an example from my own work, a graphic to show prospective clients what they will be getting if they hire me to do a digital pet portrait. This is featured on every listing in that particular Etsy shop, and I send it out to people outside of Etsy who are deciding.

As is usual with my workflow for these kinds of projects I build the layout and basic shapes in Adobe Illustrator. I believe it’s important to nail down a good design before worrying about the sweet effects. Therefore, I preplan all the supporting text and add-ons when I build. All the basic colors of the graphic were designed here as well. I don’t jump over to Photoshop until I’m satisfied with this phase.

In Photoshop I start with a flat color layer of the same hexidecimal value (#f7f7ec) as my plan in Illustrator. My style tends to have a dreamlike quality to it and thus I’m always one for subtle color shifts all over the space. I search my design resources folder and choose a blurred background gradient from digitalspace.com. I place it and resize it to fill the canvas, and set it to Hard Light blending mode and 33% opacity. On top of this, I stack another copy of it, completely desaturated and set to Multiply and 10%. This did two things: brought out some richer color variation and desaturated the space a bit. I don’t need it competing with the main graphic.

I love the lilac hue hinted in the corner, and the range of other hues represented here. The values in the blurred background also imply a light source in the upper left corner. That’s perfectly aligned with what I’ve envisioned so the whole thing’s off to a good start.

Now, can I copy and paste the shapes in from Illustrator as pixels. These are isolated pieces I can work with and the colors paste with them. On top of each of the outer shapes in turn, I marquee them with the Magic Wand and put a black-to-transparent gradient on each one. The angle is 135° to match the implied lighting from the background. I set the blending mode on each gradient to Overlay, and this gives me a kind of lit up effect on each shape. However, each color reacts differently, so the orange and the blue shapes get 50% opacity on the gradient while the tan one gets 40% and the brown gets 32%.

Even though I want a long shadow underneath the graphic, not every shadow in the whole thing will be long. This is where a good grasp of lighting is crucial to make a convincing overall image. Over time I’ve learned that one or two really sweet effects in an image need a supporting cast. Most people will notice mainly the long shadow, but there are other little things that help sell it. Here, I marquee the white shape in the center and, using a soft brush at about 20% opacity I paint some little shadows under the overlapping points from the color shapes. Again, an idea of how lighting works comes into play because not every point will get the same treatment. Each one has to be taken on its own merit and you’ve got to consider the light direction, intensity, and the height of the overlap illusion you’re trying for.

Now for that long drop shadow. I marqueed the entire  table by SHIFT+CTRL+clicking on each shape’s thumbnail in the layers pallet. The resulting selection was filled with black on a new layer underneath the table. This new shape was sent through the Motion Blur filter at the 135° angle and at the maximum distance of 999 pixels.

The result is a pretty cool long shadow on the lower right side, but it extends both directions and that creates a problem. Easy fix, though. Just take a moderately-soft eraser and remove everything that extends towards the light. Finally the whole shadow layer is set to 80% opacity.

Here you can see the shape gradients, the long drop shadow, and the subtle shadows underneath the center-facing points. See how all these little bits along with the background are already creating a convincing image?

Already this is looking pretty cool.

Next, I add the icons and text. The JPEG icons were just some stock icons I had that I added a bokeh background into along with my Black Dog mascot. The ZIP box icon is from the same set. The PDF icon is from Adobe’s site.

All of the text is copied and pasted from Illustrator. There’s no need to try and recreate it with Photoshop’s text tool. I’ve already done the work, especially with the curved text on the shapes. The text and the icons were given a drop shadow consistent with the lighting scheme I’ve already established. Granted, these are layer styles, but remember this effect is a supporting cast member. Layer styles are great for adding nuance but should never, in my humble opinion, be the main event.

The ZIP box just didn’t look right with the drop shadow, so I made a judgment call and bent reality a bit. I ended up airbrushing (soft round brush set to 50%) black under it, and set the layer to 30% opacity. Just needed contrast and depth is all.

The final bump to the title text is a Violet-to-Orange gradient set to Soft Light and 25% opacity.

I’m really into adding some drama. In this case it’s a bit of a flare effect in the corner. You’ve got to do this tastefully. Don’t get me wrong: I love lens flares. But lens flare abuse really aggravates me and I’ve seen flares used as a band aid to compensate for a lack of skill in a lot of otherwise nice pieces. You’ve got to take the big picture in mind and adhere to the mood, to the feeling, and not get a hard-on over flares for the sake of flares. Yin & Yang, baby.

The flare here was easy-peasy. Just fill a new layer with black, and use a soft brush to paint a warm shape in the corner. Start with a pale yellow in the center and orange and crimson on the edges. Don’t get too crazy with the saturation; this needs to be a subtle effect, so keep the colors at about 50% saturation. My best buddy as far as colors go is the HSB pallet. I get a lot of use out of that and the tweaks on the sliders are far more intuitive for me than the RGB or CMYK pallets.

Now set that layer to Screen blending mode and 66% opacity. BAM. A nice little bump to the overall image.

Another one of my favorite techniques is to add fresnel effects. This is so bloody subtle most of the time you wouldn’t even see it unless you watched me toggle the layers on and off. I take a soft round brush with white, set to 20% opacity (and since I just tap with my Wacom tablet it’s probably closer to 5% to 15%) and I pick two or three things to add it to. In this case, the upper left corners of about three icons (most noticeable on the PDF icon).

I do this fresnel bit ALL OF THE TIME to just about every piece I do, whether it’s a design, photo retouching, or fine art. Definitely one of my favorite techniques and it’s an important part of the “supporting cast.”

ONE LAST THING: to bring up the value of the whole image I finish it off with an action I made called “Dreamlight.” It creates a solid fill layer of a pale blue-grey (#c0c8d1) and sets it to Overlay and 13%. Once again, a subtle addition, but it adds just a bit of lift to the entire thing.

And there you have it:

In all honesty I could have stopped at the Illustrator phase. If I wanted a flat style, which is also trendy right now, or just wanted something minimal and functional I totally could have pulled it off in just Illustrator. My other artistic urges always take over though and I want there to be a more evocative quality to it. Even though it’s just an informative little graphic I want it to create a feeling, to be an artifact from that world in my head.

Nonetheless, there has to be a balance. For example, I chose to make the flare effect by hand using a relatively low-tech solution, whereas generating an actual lens flare with a filter or plugin would’ve been overkill. The effect needed to be more about the feeling rather than “Hoo! Hah! Lens Flare!” (If you read that in a Johnny Bravo voice, you’re totally with me). Notice also that I drew from a deep bag of tricks, but each one has to be applied effectively. You can’t be heavy handed or throw every trick you can think of at it. In the end this graphic still needs to impart information. I just think it should be beautiful too.

Hopefully I’ve given you some good ideas to add to YOUR arsenal, as well as helped you reconsider the value of basic drawing skills (if you don’t possess them). Comment and let me know what you think, or weigh in on my opinions. Dialogue is always welcome!

Branding the Black Dog Shoppe

In this post I’m going to talk a bit about the process of setting up graphics for a new business venture, as well as a short tutorial on making my new little mascot, Quincy:

Recently I wrote a post about a side project of mine, pet portraits. Lately it’s been blossoming into a pretty reliable income stream, and so I’ve taken it up to the next level from word-of-mouth to an Etsy shop just for it.

I wanted to set the portrait service apart from my usual work at moulindiesel.com, so I still have my website and original Etsy shop for Moulin Diesel where I sell prints of my artwork. The new Etsy shop needed a new vibe to carry it, being that there are going to be many instances where I present my services to people exclusively as one or the other; i.e. my professional haunt clients and sci-fi authors get Moulin Diesel whereas pet stores, shelters, and pet parents get the other thing.

Building that “other thing” has been the challenge. I thought I’d outline the process to hopefully give others in similar situations some guidance, as well as open myself up for comments and critique from readers.

The first step was organization. Basically I treated it like a client project and did my usual first steps: I wrote myself a client brief. I outlined the goals, some moods, and approaches I’d been considering. I didn’t have to worry about budget constraints, but I did have to look at it in terms of fitting the work in between client projects. Sleep is for the weak—that’s all I’m gonna say.

The problem was that this was all a little hit and miss and I couldn’t get zeroed in. So I went back to the beginning: the shop name. That would steer the whole thing.

Etsy only gives you twenty characters to work with. I filled up nearly a whole notebook page of idea after idea. I’m not even gonna lie I was listening to Led Zeppelin when the idea came: Black Dog! Edgy enough to have my personality, flexible enough to tweak the presentation to be as accessible as possible.

Once I had a shop name and thereby a direction, things started to move much more quickly. I decided to make the mascot a black French bulldog with a bowler hat. Something whimsical, something provocative, something me!

I needed a reference. I wasn’t going to use a random image off the internet, and I sure wasn’t going to crib a pro photographer’s photo. Ultimately I went back to one of my previous clients and asked them very nicely for both permission to use their French bulldog’s likeness and for some additional photos as references.

I wanted an illustrative mascot, probably just the head. I also had to make a fully rendered portrait to brand some postcards I was going to distribute. The quandary was that my model, Quincy, was a white Frenchie, and I needed a black one. I would have to alter that.

I went through the photos she sent me and chose one with what I felt was a cute, inquisitive expression. I liked that he was looking off to the side.

I placed the one I wanted into a 16″x20″ canvas. For my work flow it’s important to work big. Luckily my client sent me her original photo file which was big to begin with. Even if it hadn’t been a big file, I would’ve still enlarged the heck out of it because image quality wasn’t really my concern; all I needed was a map to follow.

I found a pic of a bowler hat online that seemed to match the angle of Quincy’s head. Pretty easy Photoshop work to composite the two. These two are grouped, locked, and the overall opacity dropped to 85%.

Now, it’s time to outline the piece. I’m using a Wacom Intuous tablet with Photoshop CS5. The brush I used was a hard edged brush with these settings:

• hardness 100%
• opacity 100%
• spacing 1%,
• size jitter, control: pen pressure,
• min. diameter 0%,

This is one of my standard brushes in my brush set. I can just pick it in the brush palette without having to tweak the settings every time.

Using straight black on a new layer, I outlined the image. I started with a nice, thick outline, then hatching to indicate shading. The trick is to draw mainly from the elbow, and not so much from the wrist or finger joints. I tend to use the Rotate tool a lot too, just like flipping a drawing around on the table when I was a kid. Hatching tends to look the best (for me) when it’s done with downstrokes, so the rotate tool is one I use a lot. Tip: double clicking on the Rotate tool’s icon resets the canvas to upright.

My eraser is set to the same brush as the one I draw with, so I can shave off wiggley spots, sharpen the ends of strokes, and even “reverse-hatch” in the larger, dark areas.

When this is finished (and saved) I fire up Illustrator and paste the inked drawing into a new art board. A little rotation counter-clockwise so he’s looking more horizontally and we’re ready. Because I worked so big to begin with, Illustrator’s Auto-Trace makes almost zero changes. Setting the trace at “Comic book art” makes a perfect vector version in a snap. Bitchin’.

Now, I expand it. Using the Magic Wand tool to select the white areas I can delete only them leaving just the black lines by themselves.The only thing I added at this point is I cleaned up the silhouette at the top of the hat with a Bézier curve. It was a little shaky and Illustrator’s pen tool made it nice and smooth. I just covered it with a clean, black shape and then used the Shape Builder tool (shift+M) to merge it with the traced/expanded vector art.

Now I lock that lineart layer, and create a new layer set underneath it. Using the Blob Brush (shift+B) I lay down some colors. I keep the color palette to about four colors: One mid tone and one shadow tone for the face, one mid tone and one highlight tone for the hat. I played around with some gradients on all the color layers (you can see this most notably in the hat’s big highlight).

There we go: a vector dog mascot that I can use in nearly all of my future branding projects with Black Dog Pet Portraits. I can paste the vector art into other vector-based projects, and it’ll paste just as well into Photoshop too since it’s a fairly large, high-res graphic.

In the next post I’ll show you some of the other things I’ve done for the shoppe that hopefully you’ll find interesting. In the meantime, don’t forget to visit my Etsy shops, both Moulin Diesel and Black Dog and use the coupon code HEYHEYMOMMA15 to get 15% off of anything in either store until June 15, 2014!

CHEERS!

A Dieselpunk Elephant (and a short tutorial)

I wanted to share with you one of my recently completed personal pieces:

This the third in my surreal, dieselpunk-themed animal paintings.

Here’s a list of my Photoshop process, from back to fore:

1. The mesh background is a seamless background from Ron Deviney’s “Cyborg Parts” set.
2. A few grunge brushes over the mesh gave it a less uniform look and some distressing. Layer was 58% opacity set to “soft light” blending.
3. That’s underneath the roots/tendril plate I made by drawing a tree with a hard brush, then copying and rotating three times to make the symmetrical, kind of rorschach test shape. This was given a layer style with bevel/emboss, color overlay and pattern overlay. Underneath this was a copy of the layer, filled with black, gaussian blur applied and moved down to simulate a shadow. 80% opacity on this.
4. The middle ground is a geometric figure I made in Illustrator CS5, given a similar treatment to the “tree” plate. Layers below and above used bits from the “Cyborg Parts” set and the combination of layer style shadows, hand-airbrushed shadows, and surgical editing with dodge and burn gave it depth and volume.
5. The elephant was painted by hand using greyscale photo references. Building it with the tried and true “mass before detail,” it gradually coalesced into a reasonably convincing elephant. The wrinkles around the eyes were a lot of fun to do! Since I painted in grayscale, I colored my elephant with a gradient map when it was finished.
6. The gas mask was hand painted as well. I looked at a few references of gas masks, but since nothing like it exists in real life I had to wing it. This makes for some interesting problem solving. For example, what do you do about the tusks? I had to invent the rubber gasket around them, imagining holes in the mask provided for exactly that purpose. There had to be a wider glass to accommodate the face and beady little eyes. And of course, the canister hose that doubles as a repository for the trunk had to start wide and taper down. I’m pleased with how it turned out overall.
7. The canister on the mask was actually modeled in Google Sketchup and imported into Photoshop were I painted over it, distressed it, and merged it with the hose. I wanted to get the perspective just right to convey depth in the picture and doing it in 3D made it a cinch. Google Sketchup is free, BTW.
8. The elephant and mask were marqueed together to make a black fill layer underneath. Again, gaussian blurred, 60% opacity, and moved downwards to create a shadow over everything else.
9. A separate layer of “shadow fixes” exists where the airbrush was used to mold shadows over shapes to make it more convincing.
10. The rest is post production stuff and here’s the run-down:
    1. specular blooms (the cousins of lens flares–much more subtle) done with an airbrush at 50%.
    2. levels adjustment.
    3. A “desatch” layer — a full black fill, set to “hue” blending, and 10% opacity. This is really subtle, but it knocks back some of the more saturated areas to pull the piece together more. You could do this with a hue/saturation adjustment layer, but I prefer this method.
    4. A layer that is a hybrid of a texture from GoMedia’s “Etched into Dark” set, and a multi-hued, super saturated, radial gradient. This layer is set to color burn at 10%. Again, very subtle, but the added texture and seemingly random splashes of color that ghost the image is just one of my favorite things. I love that!
    5. A lens flare at the top of the glass, created with Red Giant’s Knoll Light Factory plugin (which is a badass plugin).
    6. And finally, a gradient map with the “yellow, orange, violet, blue” gradient, set to color dodge and 10% opacity. More off-the-wall coloration ghosting the final image. That’s kind of one of my things.

So there you have it. It’s a dark piece, but that’s what I wanted. Something industrial and noir.

This is available as a print in my Etsy shop.

You can also see the other two pieces so far in this Dieselpunk series on my website’s portfolio, or on my Behance page.

I hope this was informative and interesting to you! If you make something using some of the ideas or links I’ve provided, let me know. I’d really love to see it!

Using Illustrator and Photoshop together

Amongst my own personal projects I’ve been doing these “Dieselpunk” paintings using animals mixed with technology in surreal ways. I thought I’d share this with you and give a little practical insight into the process of making two of these.

The Engine Tree

Kraken’s Ladder

The “Engine Tree” was the first one I did in 2012. The idea started as a doodle I put together as a kind of watermark on my business card. It was totally a serendipitous, off the cuff thing and the idea wouldn’t leave my head. I knew I had to develop it into a full art piece on its own.

The engine block was the first thing I made, and I created it as line art in Illustrator. I used several references for both real engines and all sorts of nifty tech from my favorite sci-fi movies. I didn’t necessarily want it to be a “true to life” engine; I wanted it somewhat kind of alien, like it was a mashup of Earth tech and something else.

The tentacle outlines were done in Illustrator too, although these were very simple shapes without any detail.

These were exported out to Photoshop into a CMYK, 16×20, 300dpi canvas. Using the outlines on the line art it was easy to use the wand tool to select portions and paint inside the marquee. I usually use hard brushes at 100% opacity to block in colors and follow that with various hardness brushes—about four different ones—at approx. 50% to finish up the rendering. The dodge and burn tools are an asset too, using those same four or five brushes generally. Using textures from my own collection I added a couple of grungy, metal layers over the engine. 

I blocked out color and shading on the tentacles in the same fashion. Then…THEN!…I painted the suckers. I had photos of octopus tentacles pasted all over into the canvas to use as photo references and I hand painted every single sucker. That took DAYS to do, holy crap. Tedious as hell.

I like to try textures that don’t go with the object I’m texturizing, so the tentacles got elephant skin textures. The airbrushed highlights and shadows made it look like a subsurface under a slick, transparent skin.

The tree was hand painted and shaded from references, The background and smoke were added last and made use of some grunge and smoke/fog brushes. Adjustment layers finished off the post-production phase.

The “Kraken’s Ladder” piece followed a more or less similar process. As before, I collected several photo references, this time of both squids and diesel engines from World War I and II fighter planes. The squid was outlined in Illustrator, and the engine core and prop was done the same way. As before, both of these were imported into Photoshop, and painted over inside a 16×20, CMYK, 300dpi canvas.

Side note: after the suckers on both the octopus and the squid, I am done with Cephalopods for a while!

The process of using other programs in tandem with Photoshop (or whatever program you use to make art) can extend beyond just Illustrator or even Adobe products. I’ve used Adobe Ideas, Sketchbook Pro for iPad, Procreate, 3DBlender, Daz Studio, Google Sketchup, Flame Painter 2 Pro, and of course some of my own photography and scanned sketches to produce suitable pieces to bring into the canvas to work with. I’m sure there are lots more out there.

Was this useful? Are there other things you’d like to see a breakdown of? Let me know in the comments. I’d also love to hear some of the ways you’re venturing outside of one single program to create images.

Posted with Blogsy

Victory

Wanted to share with you some recent work I finished. This is a commissioned piece. It is a portrait of the client, depicted as a kind of spiritual avatar–younger, faster, and harder. The scene is a metaphor for the struggles and horrific hardships she had to fight through in her life to emerge not only as a survivor, but ultimately victorious. As a young girl, she was also an avid horse rider, and the freedom she felt being able to ride for hours on end with just her and her horse is something she dearly misses. This horse is an amalgamation of her horse from years before, and a powerful equine avatar fitting the scene.

The whole picture is intended to be something she can look at daily and gain strength as she faces her twilight years. It means a lot that I could bring this to life for her.

Now the technical stuff:
Primary subject was modeled in Daz Studio 4.6 using the following: Victoria 4.2 base, with ++morphs to adjust the face and body to fit the client. She supplied me with “mugshots” to use as references. She’s wearing the Shadowcaster outfit, and holding the DragonLord sword. The horse base is the Daz Charger with Astral Armor. The skin texture was painted on in post production.

The mountains and the sky each came from Stock.xchng (www.sxc.hu/)

Everything else was painted in photoshop CS5, plus adjustments and color layers. The final 16×20 print was rendered in 300dpi, CMYK.