Stained Sarah

When I was deciding what to do for my next post, Sarah was playing around with gimp, and created something that looked like stained glass, so I decided to draw Sarah, making it look like stained glass. Though in the end it doesn't look too much like her, we decided she was the inspiration.

So to do her face shape, I used a picture of her as a guide and used the Paths tool to draw the basic outline of her face. A big part of this picture was the various brush sizes, and I chose a slightly smaller brush and the Paths tool once again to do her hair. I then went back to the regular sized brush to hand draw some of the major features, such as eyes, eyebrows, and the nose. One of Sarah's distinctive features is her "smile lines" (as she calls them), but I wasn't sure how to draw those in. After I got that all in, the tedious work came along. Using shift to make straight lines, I drew in the "glass" on her face. There was no rhyme or reason to the shapes, but I just wanted to make sure they were not all the same. Once I finished all the lines, it was coloring time. This took much longer than expected. I used the color picker tool to get the color from Sarah's forehead as my base color. Because her forehead and her right cheek are more in the sun, I wanted to try to make those lighter. I would vary the colors slightly as I went and eventually deepened the color as I got to her ear and the left side of her face. The hair was really hard. With Sarah's blond hair, the color picker tool made the color out to be much more gray than I wanted, and the roots were much too brown. So I decided to make her hair a little more golden than it is. I chose darker shades closer to the roots, and then gradually lightened them, really trying to put a variety of different shades in, similar to the face. I then filled in the mouth and white part of the eyes, varying the colors a little again. For the eyes, I used the airbrush and the smudge to mix some greens and golds and browns and added pupils w/ the black paintbrush. Sarah just chose her background, but I could probably go back and create a stained glass background later, but I probably won't.