Allure of Nectar

The basic idea was an anthropomorphic insect and flower in the moment of dramatic pollenisation.

The refined sketch was meant to capture to moment-after-expression in the faces of both figures.

I noticed I kept going back to the detail between the two figures that it became evident that the initial sketch was pulled too far back. As a result the focus of the image is more cropped.

I had great difficulty in convincing myself the scale and angle of the upper figure was correct.

This is usually done on another layer in Photoshop so the original linework is retained as a guide. The flower was always going to be a warm yellow, but at this stage the colour of "insect" was left open.

Note: the complimentary colours of Yellow vs Purple and matching Green.

Lighting was going to be from above which would make most of the floating character in shadow.

Started with the face seeing as this was going to be a focal point of the image. I left the temple in bare basic tones because I was not sure what the final "hairstyle" would be.

Detailing of the hand on the chin was also added to ensure I didn't have to re-work the expression later.

The idea of the flower was to "grow" them out of the limbs. It was fun trying to avoid making the Fae look like it was wearing a frilly-shirt.

The back petal was going to crown the head, so I spent a bit more time on it. Here I paid special attention to the patterns found in flowers to help insects navigate to the nectar point. I also decided that tendril-like segments would feature in this flower.

Most of petals were done with a Smudge Tool. It helps to blend the colours together while creating texture. After that, hightlights are just painted with a brighter colour and re-Smudged.

Started detailing hands. I think it's very important to get hand gestures right so I end up spending a fair amount of time on making sure all the shading works. In this case I went for a high gloss feel, which translated to making the rest of the Fae shiny!

The rest of the body colour was derived from the tones on the hands. I spent some time re-adjusting the legs because the scale and contortion looked wrong.

Started working on the "hair" of the flower figure. Reminds me of a goldfish at this stage.

All the green was selected and blended together to form the foilage. The details didn't really matter because I knew in the end the wings and pollen would cover most of it up.

The colour and tone of the overall image was bumped up (Hue/Saturation + Levels) because after blending so much, the image was looking a bit grey.

My pet love and pet hate at the same time. I usually enjoy the challenge of creating wings from scratch. In this case I cheat A little by making one wing, but varying the detail of the second wing when I Copy+Paste the secondary.

Because of the scale, Some texture, detail and shading were added to the actual wing.

Elements which require this level of transparency are done on a 2-3 different layers in Photoshop before finally merging layers.

All edges are cleaned up, highlights are added and pollen is thrown in.

Simple copy and paste job of one pollen, then followed by lasso Copy/Paste and reduction scale. After I fill a whole layer with varying sized pollen I smudge them for directional blur and erase the excess ones for compositional flow.

I also fixed up up the "hair" issue on the Flower figure.






Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed the process <3