Seated Woman

I used Procreate to paint a portrait of a seated woman, combining two photos to use as guides. I turned off visibility of the photo layers before exporting the image from Procreate, so that no trace of the photographs remain in the painting. Then to further obscure any sense of the original photos, I warped the Procreate painting using Elasticam. Then I used iColorama to completely transform the image color, tone and mood.

I will use these images as a start to a painting I will build in Procreate.

I imported the image of the seated woman into Procreate, adjusting her size on the layer to leave room at the top for big hair. Then I created a new layer and reduced its opacity to 50%. On this new layer I imported the image of the standing woman, sizing, rotating and positioning her so that her hair was where I wanted it. Then I used an eraser on the top layer to erase everything but the hair. This doesn’t have to look perfect, because we are going to draw and paint and eventually completely hide the photos.

Now I created a new layer above the photos layers, and selected a pen to draw with over the photos.

I turned off visibility of the photo layers, because I don't want any of the photos to show through in the final image. This is what the drawing looks like when you turn off visibility of the photo layers.

Now I selected a soft round brush and started painting her. I kept the paint layers under the drawing layer so that the drawing would not be obscured by the paint.

I continued painting her.

I started adding some highlights and shadows. Then I changed the color of the bottom layer. Note that the bottom layer color becomes the background color, but it also colors any areas you didn't paint, such as the sweater in this image.

I continued adding highlights on the paint layer, including on the background areas of the image. I exported the image to my camera roll.

I opened the image in iColorama and used Adjust/Tonelab, Adjust/Levels and Tone/Enhance to Adjust Tone, contrast and color. I exported the image to my camera roll.

I opened the image in Elasticam and warped her to change her character.

I opened the image in iColorama and used Effect/Blend to blend her with an earlier version, experimenting with all the sliders, including the sliders under Set. I use one of the negative blending modes (Negation, Difference, Exclusion) to get the interesting colors. I applied Effect/Raise at low opacity for more definition.

Here is another version with different sliders settings in the final blend step.