Pier Scenery

     When I started this, it was because I had tried & failed at another piece.  I started over & over again, but it just wasn’t working out.  So, I started doing some cold runs, just to practice, and hoped to come back to it later.  Afterwards, I looked online for some references, and found a picture of Zoe Kravitz, standing in the middle of what looked to be an intersection.  I started using that picture to do a quick sketch, but it turned into more, so I decided to go ahead and start a new piece.

Here’s what I got once I cleaned up all the random sketch lines in Sketchbook Pro 2010.  The hairstyle in this picture is the Frowhawk & Cornrows I wanted to use before.  

Afterwards, I colored everything in separate layers and combined the layers to get this.  I didn’t want to use the street view from the reference photo, and so I started doing cold runs to try and come up with something on my own. 

Here’s what I decided on.  Its basically a pier on a beach, with sand behind it.  The stuff in the back is cement rails.

This is what I got when I tried to figure out what colors I was going to use.  I actually did it in Paint.net, but did the screen capture in Sketchbook Pro.

In Paint.net, I used the straight line tool to make the pier, and used Sketchbook Pro to add the lines via freehand.

And I used the exact same process to do the poles.

This is the rails done in Paint.net.

Here is the beach sand.  I did it in Sketchbook Pro, and those little sand pockets took about 45 minutes to finish.

Here’s the water washing up on the beach.  After my Ninja Turtles picture, I had been trying to figure out how to do water digitally, and this is the first time I actually got it right.

And here is the finished piece.  Everything was combined using Photoshop Elements, but I ran into a different problem.  The dress on the model was supposed to be transparent, but that transparency was established in Sketchbook Pro, and didn’t transfer into Photoshop.  So, I had to make another layer, copy the appropriate colors, and paint over the necessary areas.  The last thing added was the trees in the back, also done in Photoshop.