Stana Katic Process

Hiyas! Today I've decided to write up a brief tutorial/walkthrough on how I painted my Stana Katic painting because I love tutorials haha.

Step one:

Remember where you put your damn notes for the entire tutorial otherwise you have to write the whole freaking thing on the fly.. like me. Yay! OK, so, the real step one is; find a victim.



In this case it's Stana Katic because jfc she's beautiful and also Castle.

Step Two:



Get some blank paper for th'sketchin'.

Step Three:



Sketch that shit, man! It doesn't matter how perfect it is because the lines are going on canvas, and you're probably going to revise it about a hundred times after it gets there anyway.

Step Four:



Transfer it onto your canvas.  Originally I was going to do a line ink and watercolor picture but when I realized that I couldn't really erase off the canvas I decided to just go with pencil lines. It seems to have worked out in the end anyway.

Step Five:



First preliminary colors. I decided I want a purple background, so I went ahead and splashed that on there, and then I added it to where the shadows on her hair will be. It didn't look much like Stana anymore at this point, but I perservered, just so I could at least say that I finished the damn thing!

Step Six:



Unfortunately as I got more into the painting I missed taking photos of some of the steps because I was pushing forward so quickly, but here you can see that I added the skintone (which is just watery burnt umber, with a tiny hint of yellow and red to make it more orange.. went overboard on the red so I had to burn it out with green, which is the complimentary color, which is a nifty little trick for all you painters out there!) I also added the lip color, and used the same dark purple to line out the eyeliner on her upper lid. I'm still not satisfied with the lip color, it's too pink, and I made the mistake of adding white to it, which really seems to opaque it out, so I might go back and make some adjustments to that at a later date.

Step Seven:



Look at your reference again. Take a good, hard look. Wipe up some of that drool and continue.

Step Eight:



Starting to get some more detailed shadowing here. Really trying to define her lips, get that Stanamouth going.

Step Nine:



Added in the eyes, started on the hair. I ended up making her eyes a bit too green, so I'll need to go over that as well (perils of painting at night!)

And an eye closeup!



Step back, a view from a distance



And the first 'finished' version!
here!

After that, I decided that the background really didn't hold the figure onto the paper very well, made a revision to that, and then went over some of the shadowing as well to get it just that little bit further. Here is the final, and a detail shots of my favorite part of the shadowing