Art Post: White Queen WIP

Hello guys, long time no see!
Since this is actually supposed to be an art blog,  I (Maria/Alvene) have decided to post a little work-in-progress so you can get a glimpse at the drawing process "from the inside".

Today's drawing is going to be a small portrait of the White Queen from "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There" by Lewis Carroll. I've already drawn a lot of Alice art when I was pretty bad at drawing and am now working on re-vamping the whole concept.

So let us start at the beginning: I have done a rough pencil sketch and am now filling in the details with black ink(the excessive pencil lines will be erased later):

Looks pretty sketchy, doesn't it? Let's work on getting the lineart done:

Much better. As one can see, her proportions are a bit distorted (for example, the neck is waaay too long) - this is Wonderland after all, and changing the normal proportions is a good way to give a character more definition. I did not go for a clean-cut comic lineart cause I like rough ragged aesthetics. It is very important that you scan the picture in at least at 300 dpi so that you can work with the details.

Now that we have the lineart, the really exciting part begins! I've recently gotten a graphic tablet and really want to get confident at digital colouring, so it will be a little  Sunday morning experiment for me. I use GIMP Paint Studio cause I'm too poor for Photoshop. Let's see what we can do...

First, I shall get rid of this pesky white background to get clean lineart. To do so, you need to click on Image-Mode-RGB, then Colors-Color to Alpha. I am in no way a GIMP expert and there probably are other ways to do so, there are tons of tutorials on the web. Now that we have the lineart on a transparent bckground, I add a new layer in a neutral gray colour to serve as our background. Then I add another transparent layer and draw a white oval  behind the actual picture frame on it - this will be one of the layers for me to actually paint on. See how it looks this far - I've painted the roses, blood drops which you can't see and her pretty red lips!

Now I am going to continue painting, maybe add a few more layers. Here, have another progress shot:

 

You have NO idea how much I struggled with this :D But it has taught me a lot about digital coloring and how first painting the roses and then the hair is a bad, bad, bad idea... Oh, and I have finally decided on the colour scheme - I love cold blue with red!
Here is another progress picture - as you can see, not much has changed, but I've been refining the colours(struggled a lot with that), trying to make the image deeper and "realer":

 

I will post the final image tomorrow during the week, it's a lot of fun but for now I just need some rest from digital painting, it's simply addicting!