Writing to Life

Please click to view it in full! The preview is so blurry o.e

She is called the Butterfly; she is an original character and representation of one Aryn Chris. The style is an attempted emulation of Alphonse Mucha's "Art Nouveau." I experimented with many things while working on this piece (part of why it took so long) and completely went to to town on Photoshop's stroke effect, the stamp tool, gradients, opacity, and multiply settings. I also used stock resources to do the text on the book and butterflies and the texture for the frame:

Handwriting texture? by XlionheartX
Script Texture by CaptainRedd-Stock
old crackly parchment texture by Teeth-Man

I used a this spiffy Modern Mucha Dress-Up Game by Gasara to help me design the dress. I knew from AC's request that it was supposed to have three layers, but the horrible creation I came up with at first looked perfectly terrible. With the doll maker I constructed this dress to use as a reference and it helped tremendously.

 Edit: Incidentally some color changes were in order for want of contrast and balance. Changing the color on the stockings was actually a lot harder than it usually is for a photoshop piece...I still had a file with all of the separate layers but it required back-tracking through several adjustments and effects and touch ups which then had to be re-done before it looked like the finished product again. Then I fiddled with the background shades since the brown didn't look "striking" enough and came up with these two variations:

I like the one on the left; it reflects nicely the autumn-y mood I've been in this past week due to the cooler temperatures here in Florida, but ultimately it was deemed that the background/frame altogether didn't flow with the character, so after 3 hours of fighting with it in the wee hours of the morning AC asked for the frame to be discarded completely.

This is the final product! (also very blurry >.<)