Gothenburg Nudes IV: Volleyball

As I gain confidence creating nude art (, well, I may be a bit generous to myself, calling my pictures "art", still, I try,) I want to integrate ideas from my other work into my new pictures.

One of those ideas, is to move away from static posing, and capture a moment in time when things move. Comic book artists do it extremely well, as do movie and game concept artists. Photographers and painters usually don't even try.

How do you create a picture like Volleyball?

I take walks with my camera, looking for interesting backgrounds. For the Gothenburg Nudes series, I am primarily interested in locations easily recognizable by people who live in Gothenburg. In a pinch, I'll use anything that looks like a good background for a photo though.

When I find a good background, it usually helps me figure out what the finished scene should look like. For example, I shot the background for Volleyball in a park owned by the Gothenburg Horticultural society. It's in central Gothenburg, and quite popular.

It was a sunny day, and there were lots of people sunbathing in the park. What do you do if you want to push sunbathing to the limit? You go nudist of course, so, there I had the idea for the first picture from the park, A Stroll in the Park.

The next step was to move away from a static scene. What do you do in a park, in the summer, when sunbathing gets boring? (That is, after about 10-15 seconds, if you are like me.)

You can always go for a run if you are alone, but if you want to do something with friends, why not go for volleyball?

The next step was to go to 500px.com, and search for photo references. I wanted to see how volleyball players move.

Next, I set the scene up in Daz Studio. I used my photo of the park as a background in order to get the angles right in the 3D scene. When everything looked the way I wanted it to, I rendered the foreground separately, and then composited in Affinity Photo.

Compositing in Affinity Photo allowed me to match brightness, saturation, and color in the picture. I also made some minor anatomical alterations, similar to those I made when I created The Moon Maiden.

Finally, I used DAP Auto-Painter to paint the picture.

When I worked on Volleyball I got a couple more picture ideas. Today, I took a stroll in the Gothenburg harbour, and got a couple more photos, and maybe an idea or two too.

Well see what happens next...