Girls of Hogwarts

This started as a quick sketch which sort of spiralled outwards. The frame came from copyright free for use vector art. The dragon comes from vector work I did for another piece, as did the owls. The crests where redrawn from reference images. I used photo reference for Hogwarts and turned it into line art using trace tool. Lost track of the time it took to get this stage.

The piece was done completely in Adobe CS5. The lines where made using either: Brushes > Artistic_ink > Tapered Rounded : Brushes > Artistic_ink > Tapered Stroked : Brushes> Artistic_ink > Quick Brush 3. The high lights and shadows used: Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Then Transparency of each set to either soft/hard light or multiply respectively. Any lights used a mixture of the previous blur effect with transparency set on soft/hard light depending on what I thought worked better. The spot light effects where done using the flair tool.