Behold the lovely Lady Rosegarden (not her real name, but it could be)!
Proud, confident, strong. Gaze into her eyes, but only if you can handle invitation and challenge in equal measure and at full force. This is a woman who knows not only what she wants, but what you want, so tread honestly. Is that her ship in the background, bound for trade and conquest and adventure? Or is the dragon hers, sent by her command to stop those who would escape her? Notice that either way, she is not at all worried.
Behind the Scenes:
This image came to be when one of my friends changed her profile picture to an amazing photograph of herself in a dress, surrounded by roses. I told her that it needed to be hanging above a mantel somewhere in a gilt frame.
A month later, the idea was still insisting that it had to be done, so, with her permission, I done it. This piece represents something of a breakthrough as it’s a return to the use of “blocking” color, as I used to do with acrylic paints, though a little backwards. I’ll explain that in a later post. Speaking of color, it was something of a challenge to make that one section of her dress look translucent, but the image was resolved with a judicious application of flesh tone over the green; again, backward from the way it would be done with physical paint.
It was originally a seated pose, so the arms and hips had to be added/extrapolated. The rose is a nod to the original picture, and also ties the picture together, with the red rose echoing her ginger hair and keeping the lower portion of the image from being a sea of green. (With all apologies to Ringo Starr.)
Her earring wasn’t actually the Earth and the Moon. But that, too, just needed to be done; it makes for a subtle intimation of power, that the viewer is free to interpret. Which lends a hint of mystery of the figure.
The plan was to have her standing next to a window, but after the creation of the background, the window was clearly superfluous.
One of the many advantages of digital art is the way that figures can be resized; after the piece was finished, I realized it would make a fine book cover… So I done that too:
I’d like to think that Boris Vallejo, one of my art heroes, would be proud of me.