Sitting in the City

A friend of mine asked me to draw a picture of his wife for her birthday.  He liked a Cindy Sherman inspired portrait I showed at Mornings/Nights in Silver Lake, so I used that as inspiration.  He gave me a gorgeous photo taken by Elvira Barjau (check out her work).  Using Elvira’s photo as a spring board, I applied my digital drawing techniques.  I’ll take you through the process:

Here is the final 11″x14″ portrait:

The line drawing of the buildings:
-I enjoyed drawing the reflections in the glass.  I wanted to balance my use of lines: not too many, but enough to show the shape and convey windows.

Here is the buildings with some of the coloring:

The line drawing of the portrait:
-I changed the lines from black to white in the final version.  I like to draw light skinned faces with white so the lines aren’t too distracting or mechanical (especially for a portrait like this).  I got ahead of myself, though, and started coloring the image before I had finished the lines.  This created a doubled effect on many of the lines, which works here, but made the variables more complicated (I did this for the building too).

The original photo: