Digital Portrait

I spent most of my time working on this just trying to figure out how to use photoshop to get what I wanted out of this project. Each section was definitely a lot of testing things to see what I liked. In the end I tried to have a lot of detail, which meant having smaller sections and a lot more of them. I think that since River is brindle this was the best choice because a few blocks of solid colour wouldn't have conveyed how her fur actually looks the way I wanted it to. If you look at the original photo you can see that a more solid colour version wouldn't have accomplished what I wanted it to. Even on the bandana I had to spend a lot of time putting in a lot of detail in which sections had which colours because there are a lot of different shadows in the photo even though the bandana itself is a solid black. I wanted to show River for the way she actually looks, and to do that meant adding a lot of detail and spending a lot of time.

I used photoshop for this project. I had never used photoshop for drawing before, and had used it minimally otherwise. It definitely took some time to figure out how to effectively use photoshop to draw something, especially something somewhat difficult, but I like the way it turned out. I like the way the digital portrait allowed the colours to be not only very smooth and solid, but also very accurate to the original colour. I also like how easy it is to quickly change colours without having to mix and test other materials together to get just one section of colour. I liked not having to wait for drying time or transport work while worrying about ruining it, and I really liked that I could quickly and easily undo/redo something. I really like the way it came out using photoshop.

As I said, I spent a lot of time messing with various sections of the drawing and even different tools on photoshop to make it more what I wanted it to be. I looked really closely at the different parts of the original photo in order to keep it as accurate as possible, and I used a lot of smaller sections with exact colour matches to the original photo to keep it as accurate as possible. I experimented a lot throughout the entire project and I am really happy with how it came out in the end.