Artist's commentary
Aria - Lake Pukaki
Ballet really inspired this work; I studied tonnes of photography and even dance reference books from a local library to better understand what I wanted to create. This has been worked on over the span of 11 months and frequently dropped out of frustration because it was difficult to realize. Plans included silk dresses that fanned out like the water now does, but I felt it was a shame to cover the body after it was carefully worked on. Water was a happy compromise. I spent probably 2 months trying to decide what background / environment worked with such a pose as well. So here we have it - background based on Lake Pukaki from Central Otago, New Zealand. (Just a few hours drive from where I live!)
Canvas is a personal record breaker at 10,000 x 7,000 pixels @ 300 Dpi
Final PSD comes in at a phat 811 MB and frequently made my system crash with 16 GB of RAM.
I eventually got around the RAM issue by flattening completed layer groups and adding them to new canvases where I could start anew. Then finalized sections were merged back unflattened. It also helps that Sai 2.0 had a much needed update to restore full functionality of hue/saturation filters and color pickers.
I depended on Photoshop CS6 quite a bit to cover the early issues with SAI 2's beta releases.
The fullsized image on dA is only a quarter of the actual. Haha.
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