After having created some thumbnails, I began working on my final piece for this mini project, which I already had a pretty strong idea for. Unlike the last two final pieces, I wanted to keep the focus on the character. Since my design for the princess is supposed to be hidden away, I had the idea of having her locked in a dungeon or prison-like area under the castle, so what would be down there would be minimal anyway.
The character was the first thing I worked on and took the longest to draw out of any aspect of this piece. I started off by drawing a rough form which I could then refine afterwards. I wanted her in a pose that gave the impression she was screaming or angry whilst looking at the source of light, as if someone was there tormenting her. I used the same process as I had done drawing her previously, where I drew out her body, refined this, then drew her dress over the top on a separate layer, and finally added colour to it.
For the background I simply drew some straight lines going across the screen and then various ones going down from these to give the impressions of bricks, and then added some small lumps to the floor to act like stones. I then blurred all these to varying degrees to add a sense of depth and to also remove some attention from them.
I wanted to work on creating some sort of spotlight-like effect since lighting was something I have never worked on beyond shading a character or object. I did not have any ideas as to how I could actually create a spotlight effect beyond just distorting a rectangle and filling it with a gradient, so I looked into a couple of tutorials on Youtube to help me.
After watching these and practicing with them (trials below), I preferred the first videos technique where you create a rectangle, use the fibers filter to create a lot of jagged lines within the rectangle, then add motion blur, a layer mask to add a transparent gradient, applying the layer mask and then transforming the shape and adding colour. I preferred this simply because it looks more dynamic and is more interesting to look at. I created a variety of different fiber filter lights since the visual appearance is somewhat random, and began playing around with them such as duplicating them to increase the light intensity, blurring them to make the light softer and changing the layer type to Screen so that it changed how my character sits under the layers of light. In the end I settled for something similar to the bottom right lighting effect on the trials below, which is two layers of the same fiber filter light, but the layer on top has been blurred by a radius of 20 pixels. I also added an oval shape below my character to represent where the light is hitting the floor, which I blurred with the same pixel radius as the lighting itself.
After this I simply began shading my character in the same way as I have done with previous pieces of work, although the layer opacity is set to 70% to make the shadows stronger. I also duplicated the lines of my character and filled it entirely black, and then used the transform option to change the perspective of it so that it could be used as a shadow for my character.
Below is the final piece, and I think this is actually my strongest piece I have created so far, keeping the focus almost solely on my character and allowed me to try out a couple of new techniques in the process, which I think worked very well and were definitely worth learning. I think that the character's pose also greatly shows off what this character is like, in that she is a bit wild and isolated, which is something I wanted to try and capture.
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