Darcy Saga Characters: The Gallery & How they came to be
Another new addition to my Novel and Movie Image Gallery: the Darcy Saga Characters.
Once again turning to Google and especially Pinterest for the wealth of copyright-free portrait paintings of people from the past, I have carefully chosen someone for each character in my novels. Based on my internal vision, I searched until discovering the best example, and then, as necessary, utilized my moderate skills with photo manipulation and GIMP tools to tweak the portrait until as close to perfect as I can manage. In some instances I took portions of two or even three other painted portraits, and melded them together.
For many of the characters I added a background as well. I noticed that the vast majority of Georgian portraits were either painted against blah backgrounds. Also, over the decades the paintings lost color, tarnished with grime, cracked from age, and so on. In those cases the digital image shows the flaws. Again, thanks to programs like GIMP (my favorite) color can be added and most flaws erased. Or, if really bad, deleted altogether and replaced with something better!
MY version of Mr. Darcy~~
MY version of Elizabeth Darcy~~
Aren’t modern advancements awesome? LOL! Come on over to my novel gallery and see all the characters.
Wow. That is a serious piece of work!! I carefully went through the whole lot. Amazing how my mental images of some were different than your intentions which now make me want to go back and read and see where I came up with that. LOL For some reason my brain has Sebastian as blonde. Who knows why? LOL Jharna is GORGEOUS! Love the background mods. Very lovely. Bravo bravo!
Well, in truth no image of another person will completely fit a mental image, even mine. Unless I was able to paint it myself, which I have no talent to do! LOL!
Sebastian, initially, was a visual cross between Rupert Penry-Jones and Simon Baker. The hair and smile, especially, was Simon Baker. Finding a painting with the boyish humor and twinkle-eyes that I image in Sebastian is impossible. Or at least I haven’t stumbled across it yet. (old paintings rarely have people smiling) The one I did use for Sebastian came close, and I have tweaked the hair to make it blonde, but coloring and keeping it natural is very difficult. My skills are decent, but no one at ILM is gonna be calling me for a job any time soon. Ha! In some cases I find that messing with colors and textures just makes it worse than if I left it alone.
Jharna is one of the few I used real pictures for. Same with Anoop. Finding paintings of Indian people is really tough.
Thanks Stephanie! Glad you enjoyed the gallery.
RPJ/Simon Baker? *swoon* seriously…what’s Georgie doing even considering Caxton? LOL Okay, so SOMEWHERE I picked up on that and my brain made him blonde. Whew…I’m not completely nuts.