She Sings From Somewhere You Can’t See

I’m always pleased when Aysha Shehim, aka Questionstar, is able to post some new art. If I could bottle this girl’s colouring talent (and steal some for myself), I totally would. She’s painted some of my favourite representations of Vimes and Igor and Cheery from Discworld, but her most recent work is this stunning Doctor Who fan art. Is this not completely awesome?

View the full size piece at DeviantArt, and be sure to check up the work-in-progress shots that she posted as well.

Aysha’s site

Here’s the current piece I’m working on for fun. It’s fanart for Lois Bujold’s fantasy series, The Sharing Knife.

My workspace setup inside Photoshop. I tend to have two windows open, one zoomed in, and one at the size (roughly) of the final art. (I paint in 300 dpi, but most people will be viewing at 72 dpi.) And I generally have photo references open around, depending on what I am painting.

There are about five layers in the canoe folder: sketch (multiplied and set to 30%-35% roughly), the leather and wood layer, and THREE algae/waterspots layers. I’m still probably going to add some water highlights later, once I get the water layer (in a different folder) masked out the way I want. (Hrm. Looking at this, I must’ve screen capped this before Algae Layers 2 and 3.)

It’s about this point that I start turning the master sketch layer off, and snipping bits of it to add to the folders for individual objects.

Lilies. *shrugs* Four layers: sketch, water highlights and bubbles, lilies, the roots and fronds underwater.

Click the pics to see slightly bigger versions.