Wednesday, January 5, 2011

A Lady of the Khemaru



The Khemaru are one of the ethnicities in my Noantri world. They are a socially conservative group, suspicious of innovation and resistant to change. They are technologically sophisticated, but sometimes they will reject a technology that they consider "disruptive." Their society is stratified into a caste system that divides them into academicians, warriors, artisans, businesspeople, laborers, and agriculturalists. Culturally they tend to puritanism, especially among the higher castes. Interestingly, the Khemaru have one of the most gender-egalitarian societies among the Noantri of New Earth, with women holding positions of influence and power in all sectors of their society. This portrait is of a young lady of rank, whose future will certainly be among the elite.

Photoshop, 4 hours, January 5, 2011.
The model for this face was (believe it or not) socialite and fashion model Kim Kardashian.

2 comments:

Tristan Alexander said...

Well, putting aside the method used, it is a fairly realistic picture. It still is missing some of the solidity it needs to be realy real looking. The hair decoration looks very real and the hair is almost there, this unfortunatly makes the face look a bit fuzzy to me. While I do not realy know the model you used, I can see it has some familiarity to me and if I had side by side pictures of your lady and the model, I suspect I could easily tell it was the source but you made her look much more exotic (and inocent I suspect). I still think if you looked at the human face and form the same way you look at buildings and made them as structuraly real as you do buildings, you would get what you are trying for!

Pyracantha said...

Thanks, Tristan, for your excellent critique. One of my problems with this was that the original photo of Kim K. was very small and low resolution. As for drawing faces like buildings, one phase of art training calls for drawing human faces and bodies as if they were all cubes and blocks. I haven't tried it because it looks ugly.