Marta Dahlig|The

making of Judith

always found Judith to be one of the most fascinating characters there arent many strong women characters in ancient history and she is definitely one to remember. Heres a shortened version of her story:
In the second century B.C., as the powerful Assyrian army invades the Near East, the town of Bethulia is besieged by the cruel and domineering Holofernes, foremost general of the Assyrian emperor Nebuchadnezzar. If Bethulia yields, the whole country will fall into Assyrian hands. Discouraged, the citys elders agree to surrender the famine-stricken city if they are not rescued within a few days. Judith, a young widow and most unlikely savior, challenges them to take responsibility for the future of their community. She enters the Assyrian camp where Holofernes, smitten with her remarkable beauty, invites her to a banquet. When he retires to his bed in a drunken stupor, they are left alone in his tent. Judith takes up his sword and decapitates him. With the Assyrian army thrown into confusion, Judith inspires the Israelites to launch a surprise attack from which they emerge victorious.

My first attempt to depict this character took place around four years ago and I never managed to finish the work. During the following years I kept coming back to the theme and right now I cannot even count the number of times I battled with the subject.... The image you see I started somewhere in December 2008 and it took me a very long time to finish. Being silent for the past 1,5 years, I thought it would be a cool thing to come back with something special. I therefore decided to document the whole painting process. Making of Judith consists of a pdf step-by-step tutorial as well as nearly 6 hours of video recording, which you can view at my blog: http://dahlig.blogspot.com I hope you will these materials helpful, inspiring or just plain fun to watch! :)

Marta Dahlig|The Summary:

making of Judith

Software used: Adobe Photoshop Brushes used: Ragged Hard Round, Airbrush and occasional custom brushes Time spent: 35-40 hours of basic work + 5 hours for touchups.

There were many depictions of Judith throughout art history but one that I found especially fascinating is Klimts take on the theme, as it is much more sensual and erotic from what you might expect to be a depiction of a historically glorified character. I wanted to get the same mood across, and that is why my interpretation is rather loose I concentrated more on achieving a certain atmosphere rather than on composing a historically believable depiction.

1 Theme interpretation

My whole working process, starting from the very first sketch is rather simple - I apply colours on a very low opacity, gradually putting more and more layers of colour on top of each other. This lets me control and model the whole outlook from the very beginning but, as you can see on the video, it does not exactly look too attractive at first ;) I usually start from painting the character, but in this case, since I planned a lot of details for the background, the first thing I started working on is the surroundings simulating objects even with a few messy strokes will make it easier for me to merge the character with the background later on.

2 Starting out

(Video 1)

To paint this piece, I basically used two brushes only: a regular airbrush and an alteration of the default hard round with slightly ragged, blurry edges. Custom brushes are great and I use them excessively, as they let me easily texture bigger, uniform surfaces. In cases like these, however, when I need to use small diameters in order to paint a multitude of small, detailed objects, I tend to stick to the basic choices. Moreover, I avoided using a huge amount of layers in the piece, limiting myself to 4-5 at a time in order to avoid any artificial copy-paste looks.

3 Brushes and layers

Marta Dahlig|The

making of Judith

Okay, coming back to the painting: I took a Ragged Hard Round brush and sketched in the character very roughly. For now I did not care of the shading nor lightsource interaction I just wanted to have some basic proportions marked in. This process let me compose the general colour layout and get a vague idea of how things are going to look like when finished.

4 Marking the character (Video 1)

5 Composing colours
While I have to admit that I lately treat the colour palette composition process rather loosely, here is an example of an exercise I practice for shade picking perhaps some of you will find it useful.:) Basically, I start off picking a character midtone as well as the main lightsource colour. What I then do is simply play with those hues, applying the lightsource colour on top of the midtone using different brush (not layer!) modes.

6 Defining lightsources (Video 2)

At this point when I had a naive sketch done, it was time to start defining the objects. For the purpose of this written version, I marked the planned lightsource on top of the sketch, so you can see what I was aiming for. I have one chosen directional light and a very neutral ambient lighting to complement the effect.

7 Basic character (Video 2)

Before I moved onto detailing the most important part of this image - the face, I had to push the whole body a bit further. Using the same ragged hard round, I ran over the areas picking and applying colours as well as marked in the basic colour blobs for lips and eye sockets of the character.

Marta Dahlig|The

making of Judith

Working on a face can sometimes be a hideous task. One exercise I find especially helpful to model a character correctly, is painting a very naive wireframe on top of the face (red lines). After you have such a model, you can easily distinguish the most convex, i.e. highlighted places (light blue lines) and the shadowed, concave areas (dark blue lines). Such sketches are super helpful and I used to do those for every painting when I was still feeling unsure about my modeling. Right now, I seldom use them, but I thought some of you might it inspiring :)

8 Convexity & cavity maps

9 Basic face shading

Minding the convexity, I applied some basic shadows and highlights on top of the face, as well as defined the key features: lips, eyes and nose. Using low opacity brushes while continuously switching between an airbrush and the Ragged Hard Round granted me a rather smooth look from the very beginning and so I did not have to worry about blending throughout my working process.

Having a basic look of the face somewhat ready, I moved back to detailing the body. Constant switching between painted elements might slow down my workflow, but it prevents me from getting bored and, most importantly, lets me control the composition of the piece from the very beginning. To define the flesh and give it a feeling of depth, I applied some shadows and highlights especially to the legs area. The colours I choose are very spontaneous and on the video you will see me eyedrop and block in the colours from one object on top of the other (for example from textiles on top of the character and vice versa).

10 Pushing it! (Video 3)

Having my character somewhat painted, I immediately moved onto defining the surrounding textiles. The clue to successful fabrics painting is knowing exactly what type of material you want to portrait, as each of the types has their specific way of depiction, both in terms of texture and modeling. In this case, I wanted the surrounding pink material to become silk, the light brown hanging material satin and the blue and orange cloths organza-like. Painting silk is quite tricky in terms of modelling the textile, as there should be a multitude of small, soft folds. In terms of coloring, since the material is shiny and smooth, the color and highlight-to-shadow transitions should be rapid, condensed over small areas.

11 Discussing silk

Marta Dahlig|The

making of Judith

Somewhere in the middle of my work, I always flip the image horizontally to see, whether there is something that still needs fixing. Quite often the new perspective looks so tempting, that I keep the flip. In this case, however, this is absolutely undoable. The composition was created in a way to guide the viewer through various elements of the painting - starting from the left, leading the view through the hip to the characters face and later, at the very end, guiding downwards to the key of the piece, which is the cut off head. As you can see on the image, flipping the piece destroys this logical sequence: the most interesting (Video 4) areas are shown at the beginning, and thus the right side One of the most complicated elements looks simply uninteresting... I planned for the painting is the carpet hanging from the bed. After searching for various references and knowing exactly what design I wanted, I started sketching the primary shapes with my regular brush on a very, very low opacity. With this technique the beginnings rarely look attractive but, as you can see the video, applying layers of paint on top of each other soon results in more clarified shapes.

12 Some notes on composition

13 Carpeting

Having some background and foreground details marked in, I proceeded to finish the character. I added some last minute shades to the characters skin, enriching the palette with more pink tones to add to the liveliness of the flesh. Not to disturb the current smooth blending, to the hip I applied the hues with a spackled brush brushes like these are absolutely wonderful when you want to apply colour and blend it in effortlessly at the same time.

14 Character polishing (Video 5)

For painting hair, I lowered the diameter of my default brush and ran with it over the sketched area. To give the strands some extra texture, I applied a few strokes with a regular three-dot brush. After creating such a highly textured basis, I went back to painting several strands by hand, to avoid having an artificial feel. Aside from shading particular strands, I also shaded the whole curls together, adding some general shadows and highlights. Later, I enriched the face in some pinkish and yellowish shades as well as textured the lips and added eye lashes.

15 Beautification (Video 5)

Marta Dahlig|The

making of Judith

Moving on, using the same low opacity stroke technique I defined the light brown satin on the corner of the bed. The biggest difference between shading satin and silk is the structure satin tends to be thicker and thus the folds are more solid and rough looking in terms of colour transitions, which basically means that the highlights will be spread along bigger areas and the transitions between shadows and highlights will not be as rapid as it was with silk. Having the basic satin shading done, I painted some blobs simulating embroidery. To quickly smooth up messy blobs, just like in this case, I used a median filter on my strokes this creates a slightly blurry, but solid enough basis to place some further strokes upon. This trick is good for basically any element but is especially effective in case of backgrounds.

17 Overal detailing (Video 6)

16 Getting pillows done (Video 6)

Having done the core of the image, I now moved onto the arduous part of the job polishing my characters surroundings. From the very beginning I decided to push myself quite far when it comes to polishing, so I worked much more on the detailing than I usually would have had. At the same time I did not want to define every bit to the last pixel I much rather hint details than paint them precisely. This lets me retain a painterly feeling of the image. As you can see on the video, for the pillow, as it was the case with other elements, I started with huge, transparent shapes gradually moving onto smaller and more opaque brushes. To avoid overdetailing I hinted some light colour blobs to simulate embroidered patterns and highlighted convexities.

Finishing the silk was a really tough process. As mentioned before, two things that have to be minded are the structure (folding) and the texture (highlight placement and smoothness). I had the folds in place but the sketch was greatly dominated by highlights and shadows, and so, the polishing process was mainly a matter of strengthening the midtone. In order to do so, I simply ran across the areas with a highly saturated crimson colour and applied it between shadows and highlights on top of the folds. To boost the realism some more,I added small highlights along the borders of the textile to underline its edges.

18 A silky touch (Video 6)

Marta Dahlig|The

making of Judith

To be honest, getting the details of the hanging carpet right was one of the most tedious tasks I have ever had to face. The recording doesnt really show how hard and slow did the whole process go I have made various preparation sketches to try most successful techniques and came with a solution after a few hours of trying. In this case, I also tried to hint detail instead of painting everything too closely. Gradually lowering the diameter and rising the opacity, I put in the blobs on top of each other. As shown on the video, doing so quite often forced me to define the borders by painting in darker blobs around lighter patterns in order to raise the contrast and overal realism of the design.

19 Pattern frenzy (Video 6)

One of the more tricky elements of the painting was the organza curtain. The logic and process of painting transparent textiles is completely different from regular fabrics it is not a matter of texture, but color placement and coordination. The key to painting a successful transparent fabric (like organza or muslin) is underlining its transparency by overlapping consecutive layers of fabric on top of each other, simulating folds. A good small touch that greatly adds to the realism is defining the actual edges of the textile with a thin highlighted stroke.

20 Thoughts on organza

So, this is basically it. After taking on last look at the piece I added some last minute textures to the background with my texturing brush as well as some golden jewelry to the character to underline the richness of the scene. Whew, after hours of working, I can finally consider myself done!

21 Closing comments(Video 6)

The process of preparing these materials was very challenging, yet still fun for me, and I hope you found it interesting. In case of any questions, feel free to drop me an e-mail to marta@marta-dahlig.com