Faking satin/silk material? HELP!!!

[Lunatique]

I've been working on a painting and I'm stomped. I had imagined the wolves would be the hardest to paint, with all that fur, but that was relatively easy compared to painting the girl's dress! OMIGOD I swear I'm about to tear all of my hair out over it!

Here's the piece(it is UNFINISHED! Don't look at all the unfinished ugly spots!!!):

http://www.enchanted.prohosting.com/paintings_drawings/wip/scythe_wolf.jpg

My problem is that I want the material for her dress to look like satin/silk, but I've looked at references, studied how light bounces off of my wife's satin/silk clothing, analyzed Sargent's paintings where he depicts that kind of material with just a few friggin' simple brush-strokes(!!!)..etc etc.

And I'm still stuck. I THINK I know what the formula is, but I'm UNSURE.

I just want to get some feedback from you guys on this tricky matter.

Here are some examples of the kind of look I'm after:

http://www.enchanted.prohosting.com/temp/reflective/satin-1.jpg

http://www.enchanted.prohosting.com/temp/reflective/satin-2.jpg

[andreasrocha]

Nice work Lunatique, but try blurring the edges more, or use less masks.

Observing the photos you posted, I would advise adding reflections to the girl's dress. If you look at your wifes dress you can see it reflects the colours of the environmet...the reflections are faint and blurred but you can see them. You can see it best in the first photo. The dress reflects the dark trousers and the light shirt of the person in front.

The girl's dress you painted is matte, and does not reflect the surrounding objects. Try light blue colours from above, dark brown from behind, and dark green from below. And perhaps where her breast almost touches the knee, a pale skin colour reflection.

I am drawing these conlcusions from observation. I don't really know if they will work.

Good luck, and hope I could help.

[Lunatique]

Thanks for the help. :)

This is what I ended up painting. The fur collar/sleeve aren't painted yet, otherwise, the dress is pretty much finished. Might add more patterns though.

http://www.enchanted.prohosting.com/paintings_drawings/wip/scythe_wolf2.jpg

[Dreamed-Reality]

Wow, very sexy er, uh, sexy as in really, really good!

[Sephirah]

Rob Chang? Is that you??

-todd c robinson

[Lunatique]

Hey man! Jason was just telling me about you teaching Max now(I was back in Bay Area for a few days). Get in touch dude!

BTW, the finished piece is posted here: http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5328