Queenie

So here's what happens when I have plenty of time to do a picture. All I had to do was paint a Queen, however I wanted, and I had 2 whole days to spend on it.

Done entirely in Photoshop, sketch to finish. Once I had the sketch, I worked it up a bit to more of a value study. Then, under this layer, I filled in the big solid areas of color. Once that was worked out (what color to make the dress, the throne, etc.), everything else was painted above the value study layer.

Most of it was painted with a mix of the default Spatter brushes and Soft Round brushes - usually at 10-20% transparency. The texture on the throne was some random swirly brush I found in my palette, to which I turned on the Scatter feature.

The little finger blendie tool (sorry, the Smudge Tool) is really great for making fur. I had the basic shading done on the fur trim of her cloak, and then used the Smudge Tool with a Spatter brush to happily smudge away - hopefully making it look like fur.

I used a lot of Layer Styles in this one. The patterns on the sleeves and the collar were drawn 100% opaque, then I turned on the Drop Shadow, changed the layers to Soft Light, and adjusted the Layer Opacity to make it more subtle.

Used the Drop Shadows Layer Style on all those crazy jewels and pearl clusters on the dress. I used the Bevel feature on all the tiny pearls so I didn't have to shade them, as well as adding a Drop Shadow. That saved a bit of time.

And finally when all was done, I had a huge light yellow soft round brush, set to Color Dodge to brighten a few spots like the crown, her face, hair, a little bit of highlight on the dress.

So that's basically it. Had a lot of fun going crazy with the detail on this one.