Wedding Cake

For this one, I decided to do a wedding cake, based on the second photo. Though the black background was hard to work with when it came to the edges and smudging, I chose it for the contrast it would have with the cake, which is mostly white. First, I made the basic shape of the cake, two short cylinders on top of each other. Then I had to shade to create more depth. The shading on the side of the layers was much easier than that on top. On the side, I put a few lines of black in using the airbrush and decreasing the opacity. I then used horizontal shading, making it darker as the side curves around. For the top of the bottom layer, I shaded around the base of the top layer, smudging it and trying to extend it to where the edge drops. It didn't work as well as I wanted it to. For the top of the top layer, I actually forgot to fill in the top with white, realized the remaining line of black kind of worked, and so I just smudged it in.

The decorations were harder. I zoomed in for this whole part, ususally at 200%, but sometimes at 400%. Because I was doing almost all of this with the paint brush, it came down to a lot of Ctl-Z's. To draw the main part of each stem, I used the paths tool (Katie showed it to me). I would draw the line, play with it a bit, and then "stroke the path." I then would use the paintbrush to create the leaves and the different flowers. At one point, I drew a leaf that I really liked, but I realized that I had drawn it parallel to the leaf right next to it, and I wanted a little more variation. So I used the Scissors Select tool to select the leaf, and then used the Rotate and Move tools to put it where I wanted it, without having to redraw the whole leaf. When I had finished with all the decorations, I wanted to clean up the edges of the cake. So I used the straight line (Shift - Paintbrush) to draw black along the edges of the cake, creating a more streamline edge. And I ended up with my cake!