by Katarina Sokolova

Hopefully, Katarina Sokolova does not resent our calling her a "Young Gun". "Shooting Star" would also fit. After all, the artist from Ukraine has built herself an international fan community within only a few years. Her artwork has been published in many magazines and books. Among them, illustrious titles like the official Corel magazine, Expose 1, 3 and 4 as well as the "Exotique" series by Ballistic and Painter. Moreover, she has had the great honor of being included in the official Corel Painter X Welcome Book. Last but not least, some of her artwork has been sold to private collections in Switzerland, Australia, Canada and the USA.

In spite of this great success, fine art is not Katarina's only field of interest. The Ukrainian artist concerns herself with physics and mathematics and is pursuing her studies at the Institute of Management and Business at the University of Kiev, Ukraine, at the moment.

In this issue, Katarina Sokolova shows us how she created her impressive artwork "Beyond the Nature" in Corel Painter.

Fig. 1-3
Like many other digital artists I also start by doing a hand made line drawing. Somehow, sketching by hand is what still suits me best, but of course this step may also be done digitally nowadays.

Fig. 1 shows a quick sketch without many details, which I have made some time ago, showing a girl named Svetlana. Later, when I was thinking about the concept for a new artwork, I remembered this sketch and I worked it over. I changed the hair, and because it was supposed to be a rather mythical picture I added a facial mask and small lizards on her shoulder (Fig. 2)

Finally, I erased the negligible lines and re-drew only the most important outlines to get a good basis for the coloring process (Fig. 3).

Fig.  4
Now the digital work in Painter starts. I draw "below" the line drawing, i.e. I add a layer under the scanned sketch that I put to "multiply". In the first step, all I wanted to do was plan the light and shadow, i.e. the light and dark parts, to help me choose the best colors later on.

Fig. 5
Introducing the basic hues - and getting huge problems with the background. At first, I wanted to do some kind of fairy tale landscape, but was not happy with either sketch. Finally, I decided to worry about this point later.

To put some emphasis on the main character, I chose light and strong hues - yellow, green and a fiery red for the hair. All these steps are done in Painter, as I find that its features come closest to "natural" painting.

www.katarinasokolova.com/

Read the whole article in issue 76.