The word of choice this time around was wings. Right away many different concepts came to mind, angels, flying crafts, but mostly monsters. I love designing monsters, it's much more liberating to create something ugly than to strive for serene and beautiful. There is a lot of beauty to be found in that which is deemed unattractive though, so it's a lot of fun to work towards that goal of making it visible to people.
Finally deciding on the concept of a harpy I drew up some sketches and scrapped most of them, but eventually came to this line work.
After I worked around with colours for the wings and the skin tone, because harpies have been designed in many different palettes and styles, I tried comparing the image with and without the black lines.
Clearly the image would look much better without the black lines surrounding it. So I continued along with that in mind, trying to create more contrast in my colours.
Adding in more to the facial features, including dark, high contrast eyebrows, I then moved towards the hair.
I knew I wanted it to look like a cross between feathers and human hair, because obviously the harpy is a cross between humans and birds.
The orange seemed like a good choice because it's in the same area as the brown which I used for the wings.
That being said, I wasn't too sure about the skin tone. I liked the general look, but she almost seemed to human, not quite weird enough for my purposes.
Playing around with hue and saturation on the skin layer, I came to this blue/grey colour which seemed to be pretty interesting, and had higher contrast, which I love. After showing it to another design friend of mine, I'm now debating whether or not I will keep it this colour or not.
-Edit-
After playing around with everything I decided it would be best to just add more shading to the darker areas using a purple hue, so I scrapped the blue hue.
My next step was to add in the feathered arms and legs
After adding in the layers of colours and blending them as I did with the skin, I used a feather brush to create that wispy look of feathers, especially around the hips, ankles, wrists and upper arms.
Next I added in the bandages on her ankles and wrists. I put down a pale off white colour, followed by a darker shade of the same colour to give the look of shading. After that I blended the colours to smooth them out, followed by yet a darker shade of that same colour on the edges and lines separating the bandage pieces.
I then continued on to the hair. I had some comments from friends and family that the style I had originally put on her looked like a pine cone, and was too uptight and put together, so I re-did the hair in a flowing, wilder style. To create the look of her hair I first put down the medium orange colour in the overall shape of the hair. After that I added a darker shade of orange for the low-lights and I blended the two together. I followed this with a much lighter shade for highlighted strands made with a 2 point brush to be evident as separate pieces of hair. Finally I placed almost white strands as shines and super-highlighted pieces of hair, isolating them to the points where I thought the light would be strongest.
Finally I went to the toes and added in the talons. I painted on the dark brown colour, followed by the golden colour and the highlights. I blended all of them together and finished with what you see above. Then a green background with a gradient, just so there is enough contrast to see everything but not so much of a background to detract from the focus.
And here is my final product of a Harpy lady. She took me a couple months to finish, but I believe she is well worth it. I am very proud of this image :)
“Humans had a saying. Mess with the bull and get the horns. Well, Harpies had a saying, too. Mess with a Harpy and die.” ― Gena Showalter, The Darkest Surrender
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