Drawing of Enigmatic Woman in a Beret

This is a drawing based on the same photograph that appears in Enigmatic Woman in Front of Eiffel Tower. It is my second version of the drawing (the first was even worse, and I’ve tossed it).

I prepared this drawing with Adobe Illustrator 8.0. It began with a rough trace of the original photograph, done by hand. I didn’t use an autotracing tool or application (e.g., Adobe Streamline) because it traces indiscriminately, and I wanted only to include features important to a human viewer. Additionally I took considerable liberties with features other than the model’s face, making them much more abstract than in the photograph, and dropping irrelevant details (except the scarf and earrings, which I thought added a nice touch). The color scheme is very close to the photograph, for the most part.

There are still numerous errors in this drawing, even though it is a clear improvement over the first one. I am still experimenting and playing around and I consider it a mere draft. I tried and discarded blends and gradient mesh objects because after a while the drawing starts to look too much like a photograph, and that’s not the point here.

The emphasis is on the eyes, since that is what attracts the most attention in a portrait. They contain the most detail. Next comes the mouth and nose, followed by the face. The rest of the drawing is much more vague and abstract, except for the earrings and scarf. I also retained the beret (as a mere silhouette), and carried over the hair in an abstract and simplified form. I retained the colors of the scarf, and reinserted the earrings (barely visible in the photo, and not really this color). I restored the model's bright green eyes (they are much more vivid in real life than they appear to be in most photos). The eyes and mouth are sufficiently faithful to make the image recognizable and to preserve the slightly enigmatic expression that I think makes this image so appealing.

The original Illustrator drawing was exported to Adobe Photoshop format (necessary to preserve the only gradients used in the drawing, a group of gradient mesh objects in the eyes), downsampled, cropped, and placed on a colored background to produce the image you see here. (I no longer include fat borders or drop shadows behind my images because they increase download time.) One of the many cool things about computer illustration in the vector-based format that I used for this is that this image is absolutely sharp, and scalable; in other words, I could blow it up to the size of a billboard, or reduce it to the size of a postage stamp, and it would still look exactly the same. Very cool!

I may replace this will still another version in the future as I continue to play with freehand vector drawings.