High Fashion
A large poufy dress is perfect for shape or vector art treatment. Also, making the dress the subject, and having it take up so much room in the image, means that the face can be quite small and thus not so detailed, which is great if you are not so confident in drawing a face. I used the Vector tool in SketchClub to create shapes from which I assembled the image. Then I used KinoGlitch and iColorama to make some radical transformations to add interest. I show how I made two versions.
Using a photo as reference, I started drawing shapes in SketchClub, using the Vector tool. I started with the face shadow, then on a new layer above that I made a shape for the lit side of the face. On a new layer above that, I made shapes for the facial features. On a new layer above that, I made shapes for the arm, chest and neck, and the neck and arm shadows. On a layer above that, I made the dress shapes, and on a layer above that I made the glove shape. On a new layer below the dress shapes, I drew made shapes for the legs. Then I filled the bottom-most layer with orange, for the background.
On another new layer just above the facial features layer, I used the Vector tool to add blue irises and black eyebrows. Then, using the Pen tool, on the dress layer (or on a new layer just above the dress layer), I drew some lines on her dress, to indicate more of the 3D shape and motion of the dress.
I continued to draw lines on her dress. Then, on another new layer, just under the dress layer, I made shapes for the shadows on her legs.
On 3 new layers below all the other layers, I made the three large diagonal shapes, again using the Vector tool. I was going for a suggestion of a runway and spotlights.
On separate new layers, each just above the corresponding diagonal shape layer, I used the Pen tool or the brush tool to draw accent lines emphasizing the shapes. I saved the image to my camera roll.
I opened the image in iColorama. I used Effect/Glow at low opacity to add glow and depth. Call this Image A.
Here is how I made one version. Continuing in iColorama, I used Effect/Raise Preset 1 and then Style/Flat Preset 18 to get a cutout-looking effect. Be sure to experiment with all the sliders on Flat 18, and don’t use more than 50% opacity with it. You might need to use Effect/Denoise presets 1 and 4 a few times for antialiasing of the edge lines, and then use Effect/Sharpen Preset 4 for some sharpening.
Then I used Effect/Scrape and experimented with all the sliders until I got an effect I liked. I used an inverted brush mask to preserve parts of her face and arm. This is Version 1.
Now for another version. Going back to Image A, in iColorama I applied Style/Flat 15 and experimented with the sliders. I used about 50% opacity. This preset lets you get some wild color changes.
I used Effect/Raise Preset 1 at partial opacity to get a bit of depth and sharpness. I saved this to my camera roll.
Now I opened Image A in KinoGlitch. After quite a bit of experimentation with all the options, and sliders, I got this. I saved it to my camera roll.
In iColorama, using Effect/Blend, I blended the KinoGlitch output onto the previously saved iColorama output. I used my fingers to resize and reposition the KinoGlitch image so that the face and arm roughly aligned with the underlying image. I used one of the negative blending modes (Difference, Exclusion, Negative) and I tried all the sliders, including the sliders under Set.
