Saturday, June 1, 2013

Makeup and Other Stuff to Do with Evil Enchantresses


I’d tell you what she’s doing, but then I’d have to kill you.
Actually, that’s a lie. (And besides, I’m rather tired of killing people.) This is a bit of concept art I’ve done for the faerie-tale I’m working on. And since it’s just concept art, it’s not an actual illustration and therefore gives away just about nothing.
Which means that I can tell you what she’s doing: holding a spindle. Basically every person who has seen this has asked what on earth she’s holding. I would be irritated—except that I actually had to look up what a spindle looked like myself before I sketched this picture. Which is highly embarrassing, since a spindle has been a pivotal symbol in my story for years now.
In any case, she’s the wicked witch, the bad guy of my story, and below are some detail shots:


From a technical standpoint, I uplit her face a bit. Not completely, because I got impatient and didn’t want to spend more hours blocking out all of her face, her shoulder, her arm, and her hand. But I did add a hint of uplighting, with those shadows on her cheeks, her nose, the curve of her shoulder, and so on, in attempt to add a touch of wildness, even a trace of a nightmare.
And on that nightmarish vein, I shrank her pupils to very tiny points of blackness in very light eyes. That’s because years ago, for a play my dad was in, he wore white contacts. I mean, contacts that whited out his entire eyes except for his pupils. The results were the scariest two eyes I have ever seen in my life. (My dad was playing somebody frightening, to say the least. And he did a fantastic job.) Anyways, though I haven’t ever actually used all-white eyes like that, since then I’ve kept it in mind that small dark pupils, plus as much light/white space as possible, tend to look wilder than darker eyes with bigger pupils (which, in turn, tend to look softer).
Technically, as far as the story goes, the bad girl in my drawing isn’t exactly wearing makeup, but as a sometimes-partly-kind-of-cosmetic-artist, I did specifically pay attention to the makeup she’s wearing, especially around her eyes. As you can see above, she’s wearing thick eyeliner sweeping out in “wings” at the corners of her eyes. That I did first, afterwards moving into the medium-tint “eyeshadow” covering her upper eyelids and then the dark-tint “eyeshadow” in the creases of her eyelids. Finally, I went back with a darker pencil and added her eyelashes with mascara in mind. She’s also wearing very dark “lipstick.”
And final note, I just used pencils I found scrounging around the house. Actually I convinced my nine-year-old brother to let me use one of his pencils because I couldn’t find mine. But that’s another embarrassing situation.
Anyway, that’s a little discussion on my personal wicked witch.
*insert villainous laugh here*

No comments:

Post a Comment