Social Profiling № 5: Three's Company

If you're unfamiliar with the "Social Profiling" facebook experiment you can scroll down to the tags at the bottom of the post to catch up properly. I did the four initial profile pics as promised, but I still had a good number of people who wanted one, but didn't get one. As a compromise I decided more or less right off the bat that I would paint them anyway, but more directly from an existing picture, rather than inventing a new scenario to place them in as I did with the initial group. Then I got busy and didn't get a chance to do any. Time to catch up.

Unlike the initial four, these new portraits will all be done on a whim, with various things inspiring me to do them rather than saying "OK, I have 4 to do and 5 weeks to do them" as I did on the first set. This is nice if I'm not finding anything inspirational until a suitable picture or idea turns up.

Christine

This is what happened with the first picture. Christine injured herself in a fall, and coincidentally I got a stress free afternoon off work a few days later, so I thought "Time I painted her a picture." If you're a regular reader of the blog you'll have seen this picture already, but just in case you're not, here it is again (uncropped this time).  All the images are expandable from here on out by the way.

I have to say, I was really pleased by how easy Christine was to paint. So easy in fact that I started, and then 90 minutes later I was done. No step by steps because I was so into the painting I forgot to save until the end (usually I'll get paranoid I'm going to make a mess of it and save several times as I go along). She's got a great smile, and primarily it was capturing the smile that was my reason for painting this particular picture (Though she grins like a loon in most photos, in this one she was doing herself proud in the big beautiful smile stakes). After all, if you've injured yourself and are feeling down you don't want someone painting you all gloomy and morose looking, right? I thought the red went well with that too - usually an angry colour, in this case it has a very festive vibe I feel. So, other than the fact that Chris seemed very pleased with it (didn't use it as her profile pic though) there's not much else to say.

Dan

When the initial list of people came in that wanted portraits painted I went and took a look at their facebook photos. This one of Dan jumped out at me for some reason, so I saved it. I've been looking for a good reason (and time) to paint it for six months. My chance came on Dan's birthday. Perfect reason for a profile picture. So I set to work.

The original image has another person in it, leaning on Dan's shoulder, so I just left them out. This time I also remembered to make step by step saves (but not that many) over the two hours of painting. With the exception of the first the others are about 30 minutes apart.

Not much else to say about it - I don't even know why I found the photo so captivating - maybe it's the unusual lighting, or the angle, or the roughness of his cap, or his peculiar thoughtful expression. I do know I made a bit of a mess of his eyes, and I had no idea how difficult painting a beard would be. Lucky I had the practice on those though, because next up we have another beard, and glasses again.

Robby

Finally we come to this picture. Of the three it probably looks least like the subject, but, if you know him, and have seen his beard lately, there's no doubt who it's supposed to be. I'd been planning to paint Robby for quite some time, but never got around to it as none of his photos really grabbed me as the one of Dan had. But then he uploaded his latest profile pic, and I knew it was one I had to paint.

Oddly, this was by far the hardest picture of the three to paint. In fact usually when I have a painting go the way this one started to I give up and either start again or abandon it all together. This time I had a something to keep me going, and I'm glad I did as it turned out OK in the end. Not an exact likeness, but pretty close With his recent beard growth he does look remarkably like Hagrid from Harry Potter, if you were making that connection.

Why was this one so difficult? I honestly don't know. Paint wasn't blending the way I wanted it to, colours weren't coming out the way I thought they would, everything was going wrong. The Magic Line occurs at about the one minute mark in the video I've embedded below. Oh, yeah, the video - Remember I had a reason to keep going? That's because I was recording the whole thing. It's not painted at the speed you'll see it here of course - it actually took about two and a half hours, but I recorded in timelapse, giving the video a reasonable viewing length of 2:25. Things usually go smoother than this - but my wife says that my struggles with it don't come through at all in the video, so I suppose that's something right? If you want to watch the video large click the little You Tube link right where the colour wheel is located.

Incidentally, it looks like my time is going to get tight again for a little while shortly, but until then I have a reasonable amount of things to post about. We'll see if I can keep posting while the clock is tight eh?

The Impossible Amy Pond

Y'see, I'm back again? That month away was an aberration. One that's likely to be repeated from time to time, sure (as I said in my last post, it comes with the job). I've fallen behind though, my skills were atrophying while I was away, it was time to stretch some muscles. I never learn in some ways though, and the piece I'll be presenting today was a mistake. I pleasant and enlightening mistake to be sure (and how many of us would not be here today if it wasn't for pleasant and enlightening mistakes I wonder), but a mistake all the same. As usual I'll bore you all to death with a blow by blow account, but lets see the finished piece first shall we.

You can click it to enlarge to it's original size if you want.

I started out with a number of goals, and none of them was to produce a completed piece. My intention was to paint a bit, learn a bit and end up with something half way between a speedpaint and finished piece... I should back up and explain more. I wanted to challenge myself before eventually moving on to using real paints. One of the things I take for granted as a digital 'artist' is that I have an extremely wide palette (16,777,216 colours if memory serves), and I never need to mix paint - I just pick the colour I want and go. If I'm to make the switch to real media I'm going to need to learn about mixing colours, and that scares me a bit.

So I decided to see if I could produce a piece using a 'real' selection of paints, and mix all the colours I needed from there. By 'real' I mean my base colour selection would be taken from a set I long ago found online (I forget where, sorry) representing real paint colours by such and such manufacturer (I forget again which one - bah).  It's over on the left there if you're interested.  You may note a glaring omission if you open the image full size, but we'll get to that soon enough.

Every other colour I needed I would have to be mixed manually from those - which thankfully Art Rage allows you to do; although they don't have a separate palette window yet, for reasons that escape me, so it has to be done on the canvas. You'll see that a lot in the upper right corner of the following images.

So those were my initial goals.  I was going to create just a messy experimental piece more concerned with colour than anything else.  Spend an hour or so on it and call it a day.  I wanted to pick an image with an interesting colour palette though, or I'd just be slapping down any old thing and saying "oooh, pretty colours" and not learning anything from it.  Fortunate then that while I was Pondering what to paint I stumbled across this post on io9 (spoilers in there late to the party Who fans, so be warned).  That picture of Amy really jumped out at me, so I decided that would be what I'd work on.

Since I was intending for this to be rough and ready I didn't spend all that long  in preparation.  How many times have you heard me say that over the past 12 months?  Yep, every darn time.  Anyway, here are some images of the early stages.  I should warn you, they're bloody horrible (and enlargeable).

And really, that's all I'd planned to do, except that eye was pretty good.  Wouldn't hurt to do the other eye right?  And then that's pretty good, so may as well do the nose, and so on, and so on.  None of these things were brilliant, but they were good enough that I may as well see how the next bit turned out.  This went on until I got to the following stage, which was the tipping point (I've written about The Magic Line before - go read it, it's funny...  honest?).  So just changing the hairline made a world of difference (I'd spotted it as being way off long before, but didn't bother to fix it until this point).

After that I had to finish it.  I mean it's still not epic, which is probably understandable as even though it was based on the photograph I was still partly making it up as I went along.

Oh, and the colour that was missing from those 'paints'?  Black.  Seriously, there's no black - not even close to black.  I mean I almost never use pure black anyway, but the darkest colour there was miles off the mark.  I did my best to mix colours in such a way that they looked darker, but I couldn't really do any darker than this deep green I had.  It's the colour of her pupils and stuff.  Yes, I could have cheated and put black in there, but that would be missing half the point wouldn't it?  Oh, and another thing I didn't do was add layers underneath as I often do when painting digitally - everything had to go on top.  I could add new layers (A good way to simulate the paint drying - yeah, I was using 'wet' paint as well), but I couldn't put them under ones I already had in place.  So, the background was painted after the subject, which led to some difficulties around her hair. I couldn't erase either; except for my sketch lines, which I figured would be pencil, even though they were brown, and the palette paint, which in reality wouldn't have been on the canvas anyway.  I probably has some other arbitrary rules, but those were the main ones.

Oh, and don't get me started on painting the hair.  How do real painters manage?  Hair is really bloody hard at the best of times, but with no black, wet paints, no real idea how to mix 'ginger hair' colour and then having to paint around it...  It's bloody difficult!  Real artists are awesome!

Enough of me moaning about the ultimate ginger though, here's some more of the step by step, cropped in animated gif, or clickable for Big-image-o-ramA (TM) if you want to peruse at your own pace.

 

A few more notes before I trundle off.

• You can probably clearly see that the initial sketch is nowhere near the same as the final image. This is because I was correcting on the fly - you can see I have quite a bit of trouble getting her jaw-line right, especially on the left (her right). If I'd planned it out properly to begin with the final image would probably be a lot closer to the (cropped) source.  Then again, maybe it wouldn't be.
• I'm really pleased with how the leather on her jacket turned out - which is odd, because I hated it while I was working on it.  In the step-by-step it just magically appears, but I think I spent at least an hour on that alone.  The fir collar's OK too.
• The entire image looks sort of yellowish.  I think the main reason for this is having that green background, pushing everything toward green, and the very yellow/green base I came up with for her face in the initial couple of steps still shows through a little bit even in the final image
• I'm not happy with it...  but I do like it.  I'm not happy because if I'd known it was going to turn out half decently I would have spent longer on the prep, and hopefully that would have meant it would have resulted in an even better picture (I say this every. single. time).  But I do like it for itself - It's not the best likeness of Karen Gillian (who plays Amy Pond),    but it is quite an interesting portrait in its own right...  I think...  I'm too close to it - you decide and let me know (oh, who am I kidding? No-one ever comments, except 'anonymous', and that's usually my brother because he's forgotten his google account login).

Alright, if you read all that you deserve a treat.  here's the same image after I took it into Photoshop wondering how it would look if I did have a true black available and hadn't used such saturated colours to begin with (so it's more blue looking).  It's less true to the source photograph, but I do think it looks more dramatic, so here you go (click to enlarge.  Natch.).

A Musing 4: Stress and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I've been away for a while. Had you noticed? Poor May, no love for May. Poor blog, missed it's first birthday. Why? Well, therein lies a tale, and I'm limited in how much I can tell you. But it does lead to this current blog entry, and I'll post some speed paints and such in with it as examples, but, as the title may lead you to believe, it's all due to stress. Nothing to do with Motorcycles though - but a more meaningful title would get me in trouble at work...


Work is, as you may have guessed, the main reason for the stress and the main reason I've missed over a month of blog time. The repercussions of this may last a while as I get back up to speed, scan in sketches, finish paintings I started but didn't complete and so forth. You may wonder why work would be such a disruption, so I'll get on and explain.

I work in the video game industry, and, if you've been paying attention over the past few years you'll know that games are big business, and they're also a little complicated to make. I'm a vehicle artist, and had been exclusively for about 6 years when something happed to change it. Someone mistook something that wasn't a vehicle for a vehicle - a number of somethings as it happens, and I had to work on that instead.

Vehicles are defined more by how they're built and how they act than how they appear, and what I now had to build looked like a vehicle (hence the confusion), but needed building and had to act nothing like one. After 6 years I suddenly had no-idea what I was doing. I also had far more work on my plate than I could possibly do in the time frame I had by working normal hours.

There's (unfortunately) nothing unusual about this in the industry I work in; I don't think I've ever worked on a game where I didn't have to work a fairly high number of additional hours at least a few times during it's development. At no point in this article will I be moaning greatly about this because it comes with the territory. I've worked on 15+ games in the last 10 years, and as I've said I had to work extra hours on all of them. I'm used to this by now (though I have to admit it's tougher going as I get older), it's a fact of my life, so there's no reason to complain about it - there is however reason to explain the effect this can have...

At first this new workload was manageable. Stressful yes, since I was re-learning everything I thought I knew in order to make what needed making, but the hours, while longer than usual, weren't soul crushing. This was back in January, and as you know I posted plenty in January - I still had enough time to work on side projects and I didn't need to regularly work the weekends. At least I thought I didn't - turns out I was wrong. But for the time being I was managing, and still fitting in time for profile pics, sketching, speedpaints, and a level of Little Big Planet 2. Oh, and updating the blog of course.

Then, disaster! Due to being a complete numpty I had misread a vital piece of information, and massively overestimated the time I had to complete the work I had left to do. I thought I had about two and a half months, what I actually had was six weeks. Bugger! Around the same time it became apparent that I also had more work to do than originally thought. I can't explain exactly why without releasing company secrets, but suffuse to say that what I had built wasn't going to be sufficient due to technical constraints, so I had more to do. Double bugger! Suddenly I had about three months worth of work to do in 6 weeks. This is where the stress comes in.

This happened prior to my last blog post, but the enormity of the situation didn't sink in until right after I'd written it. Suddenly the stress I was already managing shot through the roof - I had to work far longer hours,and kiss the weekends goodbye (though I didn't work as long on the weekends as I was during the week). The time I had to produce personal art dropped to a minimum, and with it any time to update the blog.
Just for reference, here's the last speed paint I did before everything hit the fan:

I still managed to get some stuff done though, 5 minute sketches here and there mostly.  I wanted to do speedpaints, but usually by the time I was in front of a computer that wasn't at work I just had no energy to bother (don't forget, my artistic output at work during this time was through the roof - I don't think I've ever cranked out as much stuff in so short a time before, and hopefully I'll never have to again; it was knackering).

One day, a few weeks ago, I walked outside and realized every tree was green.  I'd been so focused on work I'd completely missed the change.  The last time I'd paid any attention during daylight they were just getting blossoms!  How does that happen?  Well, it did.  Time loses a lot of it's meaning during crunch - the only number that matters is that representing what you have left to do.

At one point I did find enough energy to have a go at painting though, and this was the result:

Time Taken: 30 Minutes

Utterly dreadful. The likenesses are fairly good, but the general tone of the piece, and the proportions of the people... well, it's ghastly isn't it?. My friend (one of the subjects in fact) said I'd made him look like a Punch and Judy puppet. He's not far off the mark, if it was a Punch and Judy show put on by Tim Burton perhaps...

I put it down to stress. In fact over this time I noticed a trend even in the little sketching I managed to do. Firstly it was predominantly heads and faces, since I'm more comfortable doing those, and secondly the quality varied greatly depending on how stressed I was at the time. A morning sketch might be quite good, but a technical problem around lunch would increase my stress level and I would draw dreadfully in the afternoon. Then something happened that would pretty much prove my theory to myself; We had a power cut (or outage as they say around here).

We all had to go home - we couldn't work at all with no power. I should have been more stressed than ever - still loads to do and one day less to do it in! But I wasn't. The fact that I physically couldn't work that day was oddly freeing. It wasn't my fault that I couldn't work, so why worry? At the same time I caught up on facebook for the first time in a while and noticed that a very nice friend had injured herself badly in a fall. Not just a friend, but an admirer of my work (clearly she's mad as a spoon too, but nobody's perfect). I decided to paint her a profile pic to cheer her up. I figured it would be dreadful again, but no, no stress equates to this:

It's not perfect, but it only took 90 minutes or so, and is far better than that last speedpaint. Clearly the lack of stress helped a lot.

Not enough evidence perhaps? Well, I did manage to squeeze in one more speed paint between then and my finishing on the workload. I think you'll agree it has quite a lot in common with the "Punch and Judy" one from earlier:

Time Taken: 35 Minutes

Dismal isn't it? You'll note the same dark scratchy look as the previous one, but this time there's even less colour. I'd think it was OK for a 10 minute sketch, but 35? Oh dear, not good at all.

Anyway, I got the work done, finished it on the very morning of the last day of the deadline. I was quite pleased with that. Weight off my mind! Time to paint again. Well, apparently I can't de-stress over night, so the next piece wasn't completely brilliant, and it's clear I've backslid somewhat - but at least it doesn't look like the artistic equivalent of a suicide pact:

Time Taken: 35 Minutes

After that I did a self portrait for my own facebook profile pic. A little narcissistic sure, but I hadn't updated it since January - some more important things got in the way.

Time Taken - 45 Minutes

I'll leave it on that then.  I have a few updates now queued up I guess, what with all the quick sketches over the last month and the fact that I have a game due for release any minute (not the one this work was for, the previous one - I tend to move on long before a game is finished), and I may be able to post some images if I'm allowed.  Plus theres all the stuff I'd started but not finished - maybe I'll have a chance to now.  I was going to start painting for real once I'd finished all this work, but I've backslid too far, so I'm going to try to get back to a comfortable speed in the next month or so.  Fingers crossed I actually manage to give it a go...