Madame Gastropoda Escargot

Madame Gastropoda Escargot
October 16, 2011
GIMP

NOTE: This looks better in thumbnail view than in full view! That's why the full-size is so small

This is my first-ever totally-digital painting Most of my digital stuff is a pencil sketch or inked drawing colored in GIMP, and that's how this started out. But my sketch was too messy so I just painted underneath it, using the sketch as a guide.

So where exactly did this come from? A random word generator! This one, to be exact, though there are others on the site. I don't remember which words I generated to come up with this, but it was something like "snail", "arrange", and some kind of word similar to "arrange". So I thought "ok, so what do you arrange?...you can arrange your hair!" and that's how I got the snail-shell hair.

In my original sketch she was a bit more fairy-like, wearing a dress made of leaves and flowers, but that was waayyyyy too hard to duplicate realistically for me, and I decided that I wanted it to look like a Victorian portrait. So I took a blue velvet texture and erased what I didn't need until it looked somewhat dress-like. Really this was just a big experiment with brushes and textures.

EDIT: The position of the eyes in relation to each other was driving me insane, so I moved her left eye in a little bit. I attempted to add a bit of texture to the skin, but I don't know if it's noticeable or not.

CREDITS

TUTORIALS
Eyes and Lashes Tutorial and Lips Tutorial
ImagInAction
Realistic Skin Tone Tutorial

BRUSHES
Heart Chain Brushes
Eyelashes Photoshop Brushes
GIMP Hair Brush
Grunge Masks
St. Valentine Swirls Glitters
Skin Brushes
TEXTURES
Victorian Stripes
Purple Velvet Texture
Old paper textures (can’t find the link--will update if I find them)

OTHER
Ornate Oval Frame Cutout 04
20 Jewels Stock II