Lady: Dress, Trim

Feeling a little disappointed with Skarre and wanting to get something finished, I went back to the lady today. I was going to start on the texture on her dress, but first I decided that there was no good reason not to get the trim done, so I did that first.

Then, I spent some time examining the pictures of patterned satin I was using as examples. From studying them, I learned...that kind of satin isn't really a good thing to try to replicate via texture techniques; it seems better as straight up freehand.

Why? Well, texture techniques as I have learned them use brush strokes of lighter/darker colors to put in the highlights and shadows instead of doing smoothly blended shadows. The suggestion of texture and the shading/highlighting are accomplished at the same time, with the same colors ad the same brush strokes because you are putting in your texture as the shadow and highlights.

The problem as I see it with using that technique with shiny satin is twofold: one, satin is shiny. The bright highlight sat at the top of folds regardless of whether the pattern was there or not; it was very independent of the pattern. It didn't seem like you could use the texture to be the highlights and have it work out right. Also, the pattern isn't lighter in the highlight areas - it's actually darker than the surrounding color. In the shadows, it's lighter than the surrounding area.

So, what I did was a bit of freehand in the shadow color on her inner dress. It's not great, but it's not terrible. I don't think I have sharp enough highlights for it to really have that satin shine. I now need to go back and reconsider what type of cloth I want the yellow dress to be and find some pictures to work from.

Oh, there is potentially one other issue. There's not really much draping with her dress, so that highlight and shadow that you put in with your textured brush strokes...isn't so much a thing. Going to have to think about that one, too.