The Joys of Working With a Tablet

The final result of all this.

A graphics tablet that is. Several years ago my parents gave me a Wacom tablet. After playing around with it for a bit, I came to the conclusion that I didn't like using it for pixelshading. It's not as precise as I need it to be. Seeing as I always got too frustrated to finish a toolshaded doll, I never really used my tablet. However, since I managed to finish a toolshaded doll a few weeks ago (done with a mouse, since I hadn't figured out how to get pressure sensitivity working), I decided to give my tablet another chance. And what a wonderful thing it turned out to be! It's so much easier to toolshade with a tablet. No more changing brush opacity by hand every five seconds! It also helped me to get further away from my pixelshading habits.

Anyway, enough about my tablet, on to the doll. It all started by looking at a historical fashion book of The Kyoto Costume Institute. I saw all the pretty Rococo dresses and decided that I wanted to doll one. Soon the realisation dawned that pixelshading such a dress would take ages. So I decided to give toolshading another try. Using my tablet allowed me to get a more 'painterly' effect than my previous tooled dolls had by helping me break out from my pixelshading mentality. This is the first time I've toolshaded a full-body doll (the other two were portraits), so I had to pay more attention to the folds. I started out by laying down very rough shadows and highlights according to the lightsource, not paying attention to the folds yet. It looked very ugly, but that didn't matter. Then I started to shade over that basic shading and tried to emphasise the shading and folds by using crosshatching. While I liked how the stomacher looked with the crosshatched shading, I didn't like the effect on the rest of the dress. It wasn't the texture I was going for, so I started shading again. This time no crosshatching was used and the result looked much smoother. In the end the first layer with the basic shading was completely hidden.

Bodice process: the ugly stage, the crosshatching stage and the final result.

After finishing the dress, it was time to make a background. I looked at several Rococo paintings for inspiration, especially for the trees. I started with roughly blocking out the different background elements. Of course I had to add some mountains. No background feels complete without some mountains (I just like them too much XD). Trees are a weak point of mine, so it was a bit of a challenge drawing them. Using a tablet really helped though. I also used a brush set while painting the trees and bushes, though you don't really see it in the end result, except at the edges of the foliage. At this stage the foliage looked way too light. It distracted from what's supposed to be the focal point: the doll. So I darkened the foliage drastically and drew some leaves over the dark base by hand. The end result looks more balanced (at least that's what I hope ^^'). It might not be perfect, but I liked making this doll so much that I want to toolshade again in the future.

  

1. Blocking in the shapes.

2. Refining the background.

3. Added the details.

I Tooled!

Although I've been dolling since November 2005, I never actually finished a toolshaded doll. Oh, I started

This is about as far as I
got with tooled dolls.  Base.

making quite a few of them, but never got any further than the sketching/colour blocking stage. I didn't have the patience to work with Paint Shop Pro and had so many pixel-shading projects that were so much more interesting to make. Lately I felt as if my pixel-shading skills have stagnated, so I felt it was time to do something new. I came up with a plan: make a series of portraits of various of female characters seen in The Song of Ice and Fire series by G.R.R. Martin using different techniques for each doll. The sketches were made during the last school year (I tend to sketch all the time during class), but I didn't get around to using till now. I don't know if I'll ever complete this series of dolls, but doll on has been made ^^

For the first doll, I decided to make a portrait of Cersei using 'regular tooling techniques'. Now I know that there are as much tooling techniques out there as there are toolers, but there seems to be a certain aesthetic that is often found in tooled dolls. I don't think I actually succeeded in capturing it, but it gave me a chance to experiment a bit with the different tools. Toolshading wasn't as difficult as I expected. After all, the basic knowledge stays the same (i.e. colours, where to place the shading,...). It's just the tools that change. I mostly used the brushtool, changing the opacity all the time, and combined it with layers... loads of layers... as in more than seventy (not counting the merged ones) layers for a simple portrait doll. Don't ask me how I managed to create so many layers, because I don't even know. Layers are quite handy, but it gets confusing when you got dozens of them named 'laag 23', 'laag 24', etc. ('laag'='layer'). I did start by neatly naming every layer, but forgot to do so when adding new ones. Thus a lot of time was spent by trying to work out if a certain layer actually contained something necessary to the doll or not XD All in all it was a fun experience, though I do prefer my old MS Paint (not the Windows 7 or 8 one, that one is not pixel-art friendly anymore). Anyway, here's the end result:

My own Alina base

Obviously I didn't doll Cersei as seen in the HBO series based on the books. I read book one before the series came out, so I did have pictures of the characters in my mind before I saw the series. Since Cersei is a) the queen and b) the daughter of a very wealthy man, I always pictured her wearing over the top dresses and jewellery. Loads of jewellery, especially gold jewellery. She's also described wearing emeralds to compliment her eyes, so I put her in a green dress and, of course, emeralds. I wanted to add in a picture frame as well, but got sick of working on the doll, so she'll have to wait for her frame. I would rather make another doll than spend more time on her now. On to the next character!