complete Burlesque series - so far!

I have to say I'm a little proud of this series. When I did the first picture I thought it was a one shot, but while working on it I had had so much fun doing all the glittery glam stuff and also of course presenting women of a larger body type as what they are: totally fabulous.
I am certain a lot more will follow!

Where I want to live

I love living in a big city, especially when it has such beautiful areas like Berlin. Parts of the city are really ugly, but there are also big areas that have this amazing atmosphere, that feel cosmopolitan and like a little village where everybody knows and likes each other the same time. I tried to capture that feeling in this series.
While working on the file I ran into some serious problems: as you may guess the file was huge, so while I didn't really have problems working on it, it took really long - like half an hour long - to save, and finally just crashed when I wanted to save it. My solution was to save the background and foregrond layers in two seperate files: when I wanted to save, I just deleted the foreground layer, saved the background file, ctrl*Z deleted the background layer, saved the foreground file. The funny thing was, saving now only took barely a second. Apparently my computer is fine with a lot of data in the main storage but is overwhelmed with creating a file with this data.

This was my rough idea for the picture:




second step:




finished:

(re-) work it!

After my last piece of the burlesque series I thought I could take the older ones and push them more into that direction. I liked that the last one is less abstract and more realistic and still has this artificial glossy look due to the clean gradients and repetitive patterns. Also I like her face much more. I also took out the glitter structure because, frankly I have used it to often and am sick of it, also I think it looked kind of cheap. Here is the old version for comparison and here's what I did to it:



this was the sketch:
the sketch:

Faces

These are some sketches I did from photos on several street style blogs. I just love how natural these people look.

Join the circus!

This drawing is proof to me, that I should always do a decent pencil drawing before I start with vectors. Below you can find some parts of the process. The pencil drawing there isn't even the original one, it's already warped into acceptable proportions. Half way through I almost wanted to throw the drawing away, but then I just let it sit there for a while and got back to it later. That is after I bought this beautiful and quite inexpensive Erte artbook, I think the influence definitely shows. Now I'm pretty happy with it, I like it best of the series ( 1, 2).

guy with orange jacket

OMG I drew a guy!!!111eleventyone!
I've been really discriminating against male drawing subjects, they always turned out not even half as good as when I drew a female. So now I decided to face my problem instead of avoiding it, I've been doing a lot of sketching with and without reference and here is the first result I'm happy with. There will definitely be more in the future.
I know I'm not the only one with that problem, I think it's rather strange: almost all male artists draw both male and female figures, while a lot of female artist draw girls almost exclusively - but there is also this interesting development how more and more teenage girls are into Yaoi and draw only men/boys.

Hey good lookin'

I'm feeling summerly: