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5. Final Details

This is only a little step. I just shaded the belt like I shaded everything else and added some detail to the buttons of the top, basically just to round everything up. However, the final details step is always the time I lean back and take some time to just look at what I’ve got so far.

I’m not really looking for mistakes, because that comes at the very end, but I’m looking for (most likely) tiny details that I could add to make the whole image more appealing. The vector as such looks rather simple, because it’s no photorealistic rendering, but the detail is what makes people go “Wow!” and this counts for both, be it photorealistic or stylized. I also changed the line color in this step:

The last thing that is really missing now is some depth and it’s actually a major thing to be missing. Right now, the vector doesn’t show the composition I had in mind earlier. I wanted the boy to stand behind the person he takes a photo of, but right now they’re both standing aligned to each other. If you imagine a line going straight away from the camera lens, it’ll go right over the right shoulder of the other woman which doesn’t make that much sense and it’s not what I wanted.

I wanted the lens to be pointed on the face of the female. I could of course repose the boy and color him again, but that’s too much hassle, in my opinion. I thought that a drop shadows with different spreads would do the job, too. I therefore created a new layer under the base color layer and the layer that hold the vector of the boy. With the pen tool, I quickly draw 3 rough shapes:

The woman’s shadow needs to be a bit bigger than the one of the boy, to make it look like she’s standing farer away from the wall. I filled the shapes with black and went to Effects – Blur – Gaussian Blur and applied the blur to them. The amount of blur for the woman’s drop shadow was 25 while the boy’s got an amount of 14 which resulted in this:

As you can see, I didn’t put that much depth into it and truth to be told, I didn’t intended to do so, but the drop shadows made the piece more believable.

Well, that’s pretty much about it. I saved the piece, opened it in Photoshop, gave it a border and called it a day.

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