Gradients!

So Gradients are really cool - but oh so hard to use practically! At least in Paint.Net anyways.
So here - I used mostly the line tool to make a basic outline of a girl. I used a photo to kind of guide me with stuff like shoulder width - head size body ratios and stuff because I tend to make heads either way too big or way to small. The neck is always hard to make look right and then by the time I get down to the waist, the person I'm drawing will look like an alien. Hips are difficult for me - especially girl-hips. I also learned something new about legs after studying the photo is that they almost seem to need to be drawn in 3 sections instead of 2. The knee actually will have it's own "thing" going on. I didn't even bother with the feet because that was just turning into a pain.

I discovered and utilized "Layers" allot when making this. After getting a basic outline I made a "solid" white silhouette that I could then use to for selecting all or sections of the girl using the wand tool. I've been working on what to assign to the various buttons on my tablet and have found alt, ctr, and shift to be among the most useful - especially when adding/subtracting selection shapes.

Next I worked on getting the "shadow" in to give her a little depth. This was my actual goal for this project to start learning how to use gradients on something other than very basic shapes. Wow - it's not easy to do either. It took me all day to select the right parts of her and then use multiple, overlapping layers of linear gradients to make it "curve" around her various shapes. Another big issue I ran into was that when I had only a section of her selected and I made a gradient - I had to go back and smooth out the edges of the selection with yet another gradient layer. I wasn't entirely successful at that either - you can see this around the hips and inner-thigh.

The shadowing was indeed the hardest part of this for me and took a lot of time. It would be nice to know how real artists do this. The cloths and all the other detail were relatively easy to accomplish in comparison and thanks to the whole "layers" thing I can have a whole bunch of clothes that switch out with the click of a check-box.