Watching TV
I created a somewhat depressing scene of a box-like room with a zombie-like woman watching, but not watching, a TV, which casts its eerie blue-white desaturating light on her. I composed the scene from shapes created in SketchBook, and I reused a figure I had created previously, which I imported into SketchBook, and then repainted her in different clothing. Then I imported the image into iColorama to enhance the tone, light, and color.
I started with this quick sketch in SketchBook, which I used as a rough guide to place the objects in the scene.
On a new layer, I made the room by using the Predictive Stroke tool (the squiggly icon to the right of the Shapes tool). For each shape, I drew the outlines with a pen, then selected a color and used the Fill tool to fill the shape with color. The shape must be completely closed (the edges of the canvas work as edges of a shape). Then on another new layer above the room layer, I drew the TV shapes on the right side of the canvas.
On a new layer above the previous layer, I added these shapes to make a frame for a picture on the wall.
On another new layer above the previous layers, I started painting with other brushes to create the picture within the frame.
On another layer above the other layers, I created a shape for a chair, and filled it with color. Then I used a pen to draw its seams. I also used a soft gray brush to add some shadows to the chair.
I reused this image I made earlier. You can see how I made it here.
I created a new layer above the other layers, and I imported the image of the woman. I flipped is on its x axis and then positioned it where I wanted the woman on the chair. I used a soft eraser to erase the parts of the image other than the woman. Then I used the Transform tool to stretch her vertically a bit.
On another new layer above the other layers, I used a pen to draw these outlines of her new clothing.
On a new layer just under the layer with the outlines of the clothing, I painted her jacket with a felt pen. Then, on a new layer just below the layer with the green jacket, I again imported the image of the woman, and erased everything but her hand, which I resized and positioned at the end of her sleeve. Since she now has wedding rings in both hands, I saved the image so far to my camera roll, and then imported it on a new layer, moved it so that a different finger covered her ring finger on the hand on the left, and then erased everything but that finger.
On a new layer, I painted a brown blouse under her green jacket. On another new layer above the other layers, but under the jacket outlines, I painted some shadows.
On another new layer underneath the tv and painting shapes layers, but above the “room” layer, I painted some shadows of the furniture and painting. On a new layer above the painting layers, I painted some reflections from the “glass” in front of the painting. I saved this image to my camera roll. Call this Image A.
On a new layer above the other layers, I filled the layer with black, and then reduced the layer opacity.
On a new layer above the black layer, I used the Glow airbrush to paint the white light emanating from the TV. I saved the image to my camera roll. Call this Image B.
In iColorama, I used Effect/Blend to blend Image A with Image B. I tried several blending modes and Opacity and Feature settings, and also experimented with the Lightness setting under Set.
I used Tone/B&W to at low opacity to desaturated and darken the image, to try to mimic the quality of the light from a TV.
I used Adjust/Exposure with a brush mask to darken the ceiling. Then I used the saturation slider in Adjust/Vibrance to reduce saturation further. I used Preset/Border preset 2 to darken the edges.
I used the first preset under Texture/Leak, using the Hue setting to shift the color towards blue, and moving and resizing the Leak effect for the effect I wanted, to look more like the bluish light from old TVs. I applied Effect/Raise at low opacity for a bit of texture.
I cropped using Form/Crop for a more pleasing composition. I added a thin black border using Preset/Border preset 1.
