Build me up, buttercup

After seeing a handful of portfolios built solely on Photoshop, I was inspired and decided I'd practice building up an image from nothing, building up it's colors, and tonality myself. It's been awhile since I've build up anything like that so it was a long and tedious process but I got it done, or at least tried. I've learned to love Illustrator, and now I actually prefer it better than Photoshop so the fact that I don't have it leaves me feeling paralyzed sometimes. But after finding some incredibly beautiful and intricate photoshop work I was encouraged to keep practicing and perfecting my use of photoshop. I love using photoshop to enhance or tweak photos (after all that's what its for) but with enough practice and patience you can render just about anything.. just without the ever so lovely and helpful vectors on Illustrator. Here's what I have so far.

This is my original drawing done in graphite on newsprint.
(Stupid idea by the way, newsprint doesn't last to long and isn't the best for delicate work, I should have used bristol board. Lesson learned) It's a fairly old piece that I did it either early this year like in February sometime. I also wanted to develope the rest of the image and get rid of the negative space shes drowning in. I will do that soon enough. For now we're moving on...

Here's what I had halfway through the process. I was still building up the shadows and layers of the dress and the hair was a mess at this point. Also the skin tone wasn't to appealing so I definitly had along way to go.

Tada!!! We can call her Buttercup for now. But I'm definitely not finished with her. If you examine her real good she's got to many flaws and imperfections that bug me so I'll go in one day and clean her up. Then that's when I can start developing a background and stuff too. I have a tendency to leave pieces halfway developed so usually the negative space will come back and haunt me.

Despite all the flaws that bug me, I'm pretty happy with what I have. I wasn't sure I could even develop this image from scratch, especially working from graphite into color (note digital color*) can be pretty tedious. And from someone who's pretty particular about color use (I'm not to much of a color fan, Give me anything monochromatic and I'll be more than happy) I'm pretty satisfied. Alright well I think I'm done practicing for now, back to working on secret projects and stuff.