Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

I changed the title from the sketch's original; kind of a Shakespeare (the writer, that is) quote. hehee

This took ages to complete! But I guess it turned out okay. It's from this drawing - [link] (the background information is on that as well; I'm just going to put the progress down on here).

This was all done with Photoshop Elements (since I temporarily uninstalled all my Adobe CS programs... ). It actually had two parts to it too...

The first part was working on Shakespeare and Avalon by themselves (outlining, coloring, shading, etc.). This was the longest part to do because of all the different layers mostly; almost everything had it's own layer (eyes, nose, background parts, etc.), and they also needed to be carefully placed in a certain order; if not, it'd all turn out terrible at the end (hopefully, that didn't show). A lot of testing and experimenting on this... Plus, I had to redo most of Avalon after PS Elements closed, but I got it back as close as I could get it (her lighter markings are a bit off though, but not really noticable). The very last bit to add (well, remove actually) was to make part of Shakespeare a bit transparent (the biggest thing I wanted to convey from the sketch). I didn't mess with the opacity because I didn't want it to be a completely uniformed look; I wanted some of him to be a bit solid-ish too. So I used the eraser tool, changed its opacity and used the "fuzzy" edged type, and merely dabbed around the edges and made an even less opacity (I think it was around 20-35%) for the area inside the lines. I also added a whitish "glow" with a light opacity brush (small smears around the two).

Once that was all said and done (it was last night finally), it was time for the background and touch-ups. Because of all the layers and such, I had to do this in a new PSD file. I got searched for a background on SXC, and I had to crop out the section I needed, then resize it to a good proportion to the characters (back then, about 2500px on the width). However, I erased a corner of the background and made a somewhat light and dreamish way behind Shakespeare (hardest to do, and I don't know if it looks right or not). I added little sparkles (from two types of brushes) to give it a little effect. Then I added the watermark, resized it a couple times to its current size, and it was done. ^.^

I think this is one of my great ones too (a lot of work put into it, perserverance and determination to finish it, and it turning out quite well overall). Well... Maybe character layout wise (I suck at background stuff), and I should really give credit to how I outlined and colored... [link] (love for that! ). I might do more of my colored work like that, but slightly different (outlining goes to Illustrator once that's back up). It's a lot easier than how I used to do my coloring jobs.



Background image from SXC - [link]