Slow Cooked Speed

I'll be honest up front.  Three of the speedpaints that follow pretty much stink.  Whether the other three do I leave to you to decide.  One thing is certain though; the relative quality of these things is usually based on the following:

1) Whether it's based on a photograph
2) How long it takes to do
3) Whether I'm using a technique or software I know well

If it's based on a photo, I took a little time over it, and I'm using tools I'm comfortable with, the results will usually at least be acceptable.  Anything else and quality becomes a complete crap shoot.  Worth noting for future reference I think.

Oh, and before we proceed to looking at pictures, you might wish to come back on Monday as well - I can pretty much guarantee another new post then.

Time Taken: 15 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

So, given the time spent, the lack of reference and the unusual tool setup* I guess I'm actually OK with this one looking as it does.  There's potential here if nothing else.  Not much else to say - I just opened AR4 and started painting, this was the result.  I hesitate to say 'She was the result' because other than the lipstick and high eyebrows there's something very masculine about 'her'.  Oh, I guess I did have something else to say after all.

*It's the oil tool, which I'm used to in Studio Pro, but it works slightly differently in AR4, and it was set up in an unusual way.

Time Taken: 40 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

This one is slightly better, but it also took almost 3 times as long.  Other than the time this had the same constraints as the previous picture - no reference, odd tool setup (I'm still finding my preferences in AR4).  The changes to the Oil tool between ArtRage versions are not huge, but seem to have a profound effect on how they feel to work with.  I'll keep plugging away at it for a while, but I'm still not comfortable enough with them to try anything really finished in AR4.

Time Taken: 75 Minutes
Software: ArtRage Studio Pro

This one on the other hand is disappointing given the three required items were in place.  It took over an hour, using familiar tools, and is based on a photograph.  Here's the step by step:

So yes, it's a nice enough picture, but I think I should be able to do a lot better.  I suspect I'll paint Robin Hood's bay again, or at least somewhere similar.  Nothing else to say here - I just like the picture and painted it.  Move along now.

Time Taken: 15 Minutes
Software: Black Ink

And keep moving along...

Oh, alright I'll say something.  I'd downloaded the trial of Black Ink as it seemed like it might be an interesting new tool to use, and while it certainly had some powerful features I didn't like the interface, and on my machine I found it slow and cumbersome.  This may not be the case on all machines (I need to update my graphics card after all), but it made drawing anything unpleasant.  I decided to try a speedpaint anyway and this is the result.  I might give it another chance before the end of the trial, but we'll see.

The image itself is based on a photograph I'd seen on Pinterest earlier, but is not referenced from it directly; just from my memory of it.  After 15 minutes I could see it wasn't going as I would like and gave up on it.  Simple as that.

Time Taken: 60 Minutes
Software: ArtRage Studio Pro

(Mild spoilers for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special "Day of the Doctor" follow, if you've not seen it)

Back to the software I'm familiar with,and spending a bit of time over it and referencing  from a photograph (in this case a still captured from a TV broadcast).  I was watching the show and this shot appeared.  The first thing I thought was "Holy crap, that's awesome!" and the second was "I have to paint that!"  I have no means of capturing stills from TV though (I might get around to setting something up for that one day), so I had to nab one someone else had taken a couple of days later.  Here's the step by step:

Firstly I laid down the basics with the Palette Knife tool.  I'm not usually much good with it, and sure enough once I reached the 4th image here I decided to move onto something more familiar (I'll keep using the palette knife in future though - it was very useful for rapidly blocking out the main forms - I think it was only 10 minutes to arrive at that 4th image).  With the oil paint tool I finished off the rest of it.  I'm reasonably pleased with it, especially his left eye (the right one in the picture).  I loved the lighting and Capaldi's expression in the original shot, and I think I mostly managed to capture that here.

Time Taken: 125 Minutes
Software: ArtRage Studio Pro
Based on stock from NicklausseStock

This one ticks all the boxes, with two small things different to mix it up.  It's using software I know, based on a photograph and took a little over two hours to paint.  It might have taken less time, but I didn't choose the best time to paint it and got interrupted a few times (the time here is the time actually spent painting, rather than from the time I started to the time I finished which was more like 6 hours).

I'd wanted to paint this image of her for a while as I liked her expression and hair, but I kept putting it off.  I finally started it as this was the first photo that popped up when I was looking for something to paint.  I was using the oil brush tool in ARSP, which I'm very familiar with, but I was using the oval brush rather than the rectangular one.  These act very differently, and usually I use the rectangle as I find it more precise (the oval is very useful for hair though), so this was an interesting experiment for me.  I also did it on one layer, which is not terribly unusual, although I usually keep the background as it's own layer to make later touchups to it easier.  I'm quite pleased with the result, although it shares some common flaws with my other work (Her head is not turned enough, her body not angled enough, that sort of thing).

OK, that's all I have for now.  Come back Monday.  No, really, that's all, come back then...

Painting Class: Painting Still

Well, I'm sort of amazed how fast the last few months have gone by, and how little artwork I seem to have done in that time.  I was worried at one point that I was slipping back into the mode I entered that eventually led to the creation of this Blog - that of not being fussed to do any art, a state that lasted close to 10 years.

Thankfully though I am doing art - less than I probably should, but vastly more than I was during those 10 years.  The stresses of the last couple of months are wearing off too, so more is likely to be forthcoming.  After this post I have one more planned before the end of the month (possibly 2, but the other will be quite personal and have no art in it, so you likely don't care).  Which brings me back to this post, and why I'm commenting on how time has flown:  It's an art class post.

The last post I wrote on the subject was after my last class waaay back in August.  It doesn't seem that long ago, yet it was almost 3 months.  I started another class about 10 weeks ago and just finished it.  I didn't attend all 10 sessions (I think I missed 3), but I painted a reasonable amount in those sessions I did attend, and at home when I missed one of those 3.  As a result I have 5 new paintings of vastly differing quality. They are all on canvas board, painted in Acrylic, but the sizes vary.  Incidentally, all the photographs but one are from angles other than that at which I was painting as I took them as an after thought rather than during the process.

So this is the one I'm least happy with.  I'm not the worlds fastest painter, so I decided to leave out some of the objects you'll see in the photo for time reasons.  Even so, it took me two sessions (not counting setup and break down, that's about two hours a time), and looks really sloppy to me.  Here's the photo of the scene it's based on, from close to the same angle from which it was painted (I think I was looking down on it more).

So you can see I got the proportions way off the mark, and everything's a bit too bright in the painting. For all that though it's not a complete failure - One thing I didn't mention before is that all of these look better in real life than the photographs really convey, I'm just not very good at photographing them as yet.  So I'm quite pleased with the orange ball (actually an egg end on).  I'd painted the A being far to orange, which made it difficult to get the egg as bright as I would have liked, so I dulled it down at the last minute, to a poor result, but it does mean the egg stands out quite nicely, whereas it would have been lost before.  The cloth isn't bad either, especially compared to some of the later ones.

This second piece took three weeks, and is probably the best of those I did, even though I don't like it all that much.  All the pieces this time around were still life, which is fine, but it would have been nice to mix it up a bit (mind you, nothing was stopping me from doing just that if I'd wanted to work on something else instead, so it's entirely my own fault).  The image of the painting itself is a little washed out, the real colours are a little better.  Here's the photo of the scene.

So I'm not happy with most of the shapes.  The paint brushes are wobbly, the gear is squiff, the flower too blocky on the lower left and so on.  I quite like the can though, which is why I chose this particular scene (we had a choice of two).  At one point the flower pot was a much ruddier brown.  Paula (who runs the class) talked me into trying to make it closer to the actual, brighter, colour and I'm glad she did.  Here's a shot taken after the first session, where you can see the layout pencils and the less saturated brown of the flowerpot.

My mother wants to have this one, I really don't know why.

This one was painted the evening before halloween, hence the blood that was not in the original.  Actually, the photo below is probably the closest to the angle I saw the actual mask from, so you can see I made a bit of a mess of the perspective.  You can see that I've left out the things from the table itself - choosing to focus on the mask.

A better thing to do would be to have made the entire background blue, but I thought it would be a challenge to capture the silvered material.  Did an okay job I guess, and the whole thing took only 2 hours.  It's the one I like the most of the 5, even though it's not very accurate (working from life is a lot harder than working from photos, and I have a hard enough time doing that).

This and the next are quick value studies, and for this one I didn't lay out using pencils to begin with but went straight for the paint (similar to the way I do most of my speedpaints, but with, y'know, paint?).  The downside of this is that the composition is pretty weak, with far too much black space.  I also left out a small tower from on top of the cylindrical box.  Sadly this is the only one for which I don't have a photo of the original scene.  Despite the flaws, I quite like it - I think the pig turned out pretty well. as did the shadows.  The whole thing took only 40 minutes, aided by my not needing to worry about colour I suspect.

And here's the last one.  Another value study, but I wanted to have the tangerine be orange.  I did lay this out in pencil first, but mostly just with simple block forms so I could get on with the painting.  This backfired a little as the weights came out a little weak looking.

The proportions on the A are better than they were in the first picture, but it's still a little stubby.  This was mostly straight lines and circles, which are tricky to do with paint it seems (unlike digital stuff I can't just hold control and click the endpoint for a straight line).  I may need to make myself one of those painters straight-edges out of a bit of dowel and a sponge to help with the problem, although I was moving quick on this one and probably wouldn't have wanted to slow down anyway if I'd had one.  It took about 70 minutes I think.


And that's it for this post.  Hopefully I'll get another post up this week (month), and I'll certainly get one done for next.  You know, looking at those photos again, I wouldn't mind basing some digital work on a couple of them, they might turn out quite well.  Or I could try them again with real paint later, a reasonable gauge of progress perhaps.