Crosslegged
I made this image in SketchBook and gave it some finishing touches in iColorama. In Sketchbook, I layered effects on top on one another, using different layers to build the tones and blends that I wanted. I used an airbrush for the skin and also for the shadows in the image, because of the smoothness and the softness that can be achieved with them.
In SketchBook, I drew this sketch freehand, using a reference photo
On a new layer under the sketch, I airbrushed in a skin tone.
On a new layer under the previous layer, I used a soft pastel to color her hair.
On a new layer just above the hair color layer, I used a darker soft pastel to add shadows to her hair, and then on a new layer just above that one, I used a marker to add streaky highlights to her hair.
On new a layer above all the hair layers, I used a marker to color in her glasses.
On a new layer just under the glasses color layer, I used a green-black marker to color the glass of her glasses.
On a new layer just above the previous layer, I airbrushed in a bit of reflection from the glass of her glasses.
On a new layer just above the previous layer, I used a large marker to add some streaky reflections to her glasses, and then reduced the layer opacity a bit.
On a new layer just under the sketch layer, I used a red marker to color in her mouth.
On a new layer above the skin tone layer but below the hair layers, I used a marker to color in her clothing. I also went back to the skin tone layer and erased the skin color that had strayed outside her figure.
On a new layer above the hair layers, I used a dark airbrush to add shadows between her knees, and on her neck. I used an eraser to erase color that strayed out of the desired areas.
On a new layer under the sketch layer, I used a marker to color two colors onto her sneakers.
On new a layer above the skin tone layer but under the clothing layer, I airbrushed in some darker skin tones for shadows. I continued making several layers above this to airbrush in different shades of skin shadows and highlights. After airbrushing each layer, I erased color that had strayed beyond the desired areas.
Above the shoes and clothing layers, I added some new layers with airbrushed shadows on her shoes as well as on her clothing. After airbrushing each layer, I erased color that had strayed beyond the desired areas.
Then on a new layer above the hair layers, I used one of the synthetic brushes to paint in some texture into her hair.
I added a layer under all the others and filled it with a light yellow color. On a new layer above that one, I used a marker to draw in a suggestion of a scene in the background. Then on new a layer above that one, I airbrushed in some shadows.
On a new layer above the previous one, I painted some suggestions of reflections on the background windows.
On a new layer above the other background layers, I imported an image I had created previously. The image is a texture created in MetaBrush from an old newspaper clipping (you can see how I made it here). I used the eraser to erase the areas I didn’t want the imported image to cover. Then on a new layer just under the sketch layer, I used an airbrush with white paint to paint in some sunlight streaming from the left. I reduced the opacity of the layer until I got the desired density of the color. Then on a layer above that, I used a white marker to paint some highlights along the left side of her figure and hair. I saved the image to my camera roll.
I opened the image in iColorama. I used Preset Border preset 7 to create a border, with the radius set to the maximum setting, and blur set to zero. I used Effect/Sharpen preset 4 with a low radius setting for sharpen the image.
