And there she is (albeit in her new, diminutive form)! I tried resizing her several times before I settled on this particular height. Photoshop is good that way. Since I was too lazy to draw any footwear, I figured the princess should have a nice grassy knoll to stand on. But right now she still looks a little pasted on, and the shadows don’t quite match the angle of the sun being cast on the ruins. Time for some careful shading…oh, and a spear would be nice too…
Several tattoos and few subtle shadows later, our princess is beginning to settle into the picture. I also did some Internet research on spear heads to give the lady’s spear a tinge of authenticity, but the ceremonial feather was really just an afterthought. The shading on the spear helps to anchor the figure next to the tree, as does the cast shadow on the ground.
The cast shadow has its own sordid history: first, I duplicated the layer of the lovely Amazon lady (and her spear) which I then darkened all the way down to a black silhouette via the Hue/Saturation window. Then I stretched the silhouette to fit the ground with the Edit > Free Transform tool and then made the entire layer semitransparent so that the underlying grass texture could show through the silhouette. And then I probably threw in a couple of blur filters for good measure. As complicated as that sounds, it’s still easier (at least for me) than trying to calculate where the shadows will fall by hand.
See, I told you those leopard spots would come in handy! Pretty much every pulp fiction magazine I’ve ever seen with an Amazon vixen depicted on the cover is wearing some sort of skimpy leopard-skin outfit (even when they’re on the moon). And let’s face it, nothing instantaneously says “Amazon†quite like a skimpy leopard-skin outfit. Hey, I don’t make these rules up, I just follow them mindlessly.
The Daggit headdress was almost as much of a pain to do as the dress. It had to be instantly recognizable to die-hard Battlestar Galactica fans and yet still look like an actual animal headdress that a woman of the wild would be willing to substitute for a pair of ear muffs. At least the bright orange fur doesn’t clash with her outfit.
And then I said to myself: “Self! Don’t you see how the sun hitting the mist from the waterfall would create a totally kick-ass rainbow?†And I said to myself, “Hey, you’re right! So…how do you propose we do that…in Photoshop?†So I thought about if for a while and then I said (to myself), “Aha! I’ll use that Edit > Stroke function thingy I learned about while looking up Photoshop tips on Epilogue.net!†Much later, after my rainbow turned out even better than I thought it would, I spent the rest of the evening patting myself on the back for being so clever. In fact, I was so proud of myself, I drew this little diagram just so that you too can follow my sterling example:
