In my previous post I shared 8 rough layouts that I had created for Betty K. She chose her favorite, but that wasn't the final layout.
This is the layout Betty chose. A double portrait of Lacy, with her head rendered in a single color. This is a crude layout I created in Photoshop to get the ball rolling on Lacy's portrait.
After Betty chose this rough concept, I suggested some ways to make the scene more beautiful, like adding green summer leaves on the trees, cleaning up the muddy shore, and enhance the rays of light.
But there was more to the journey….
As we focused on how to fine-tune the scene, Betty went through her photos again and found several more shots of a river scene with beautiful colors and the Smoky Mountains in the distance that she loved.
So I brought the head and full-body from the previous layout into that scene. There were several photos of the Smoky Mountain river scene. This is one….
This is another….
The sunset colors and the clouds are really beautiful.
I didn’t like that dark island behind Lacy’s head though. Too much stuff clumped in the upper right corner.
So I “flopped” the background photo the opposite way, putting the island in the upper left instead. This balances the composition nicely and really makes Lacy’s smiling face stand out against the beautiful sky. Betty agreed, this was our layout.
But keep going, there’s more....
Once Betty decided on the layout she wanted to use, I fine-tuned it.
I was able to make Lacy’s head study larger. And center the full-body more. Although the full-body was just a silhouette in Betty’s photo, I was able to bring out the contrast of her rust markings, using Photoshop. I had to stretch the contrast to the max, and it doesn’t show her correct color. In the actual artwork she’ll be a red Dobe. I also adjusted the colors in the background scene to really bring out the beautiful sunset colors.
Now I have my working layout to create the artwork. This is what I will have on my monitor in my art studio to use as reference while I'm working. I will “copy” what I see in this Photoshop layout, but I’ll make it more artistic and beautiful as I go along.
