The Speed of Warm Molasses

I'm a little late getting to this speedpaint post.  The most sensible way to do them would probably be the first weekend of the following month so that what I did, and why, is fresher in my mind.  This is of course the last weekend of the following month, which is less ideal.  Still, at least I'm not falling into the next month as I started to do with my sketch posts a while ago, and look how that ended up (hint: months and months behind).

Still, last month was actually pretty good when it comes to speedpaints, with 6 to show, except it's actually sort of 14, for reasons.  I'll get into that below.  This month on the other hand I've done 4 so far to show next month.  I might get to doing another, but maybe not.  With the exception of the sketches though I think this brings me back up to date again (finally).  I may be forgetting something though, but if I am I've forgotten (obviously), so I have no idea what it is.  Okay, enough preamble, lets look at splotches of colour that look like things!

Time Taken: 165 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: Kurt Russell as Jack Burton

I realised half way through painting this that I've been doing a sort of unofficial walk through 80's cinema during my time since I started Speedpainting.  There were a couple of not very good ones early on referencing Die Hard, Robocop and Blade Runner, and then more recently I've covered The Last Starfighter and Terminator.

This one is from Big Trouble in Little China of course.  I say of course, but there's every possibility that you, the reader, have not seen the movie, or even heard of it.  I'm thinking back to when I saw the trailer to the Robocop reboot in the cinema, and in the row behind me were two 20 year olds who had never even heard of the original.  I mean yeah, you've never seen it, but surely somewhere, somehow you'd have heard of it right?  Internet Memes or something?  Okay, well, never mind I guess.

BTILC is a fun movie, made at the height of the 80's 'Fun Movie' tidal wave, and it's also one of the more quotable movies of all time.  The hook isn't really the Chinatown setting, it's that the protagonist Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) isn't really the hero, he just thinks he is. The film follows him around while the real hero (Wang Chi, played by Dennis Dun) is off doing his hero thing.  To be fair Burton does end up defeating the villains, but it's more by luck than any kind of judgment. At one point Jack gets lipstick on his mouth without knowing it, and spends the next few scenes being all macho with a bright red mouth - hence the picture above.

So after all that explanation, I'll keep the process description fairly short.  The pose was taken from a behind the scenes image of Russell speaking with the director (John Carpenter), but the head is taken from a screen-grab of the film itself.  He does not have makeup on in the photo.

The painting itself was fairly straight forward.  I used a 4x4 grid to get his pose about right, but it wasn't a lot of use for the headshot (I could have used another grid, but was trying to get the likeness without one).  As a result a lot of the early stages were my trying to make his head look right.  I did get a fairly caricatured version of him quite easily, but lots of moving features around and widening his head followed to get him more naturalistic looking.

Since this was done in Photoshop I used some layer FX to get the nice neon glow and blur in the background, and played with the channels to get a little fringing into the final picture.  The background isn't completely abstract by the way, it's based on a statue that features prominently in the final act of the film, though you'll probably have to squint to make it out.

Time Taken: 60 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: This and that.

I'm trying to get into the habit of doodling ideas when I get them.  I'm not really doing a good job of it so far, but this is an instance of that.  The idea is to get an idea down fairly undiluted while it's still fresh in my mind, so that if I want to come back and make a real painting of it some time I can refer to what I was thinking originally rather than second guessing myself months down the line.  You may note I don't have many original finished pieces yet - They'll happen eventually I hope, but that second guessing thing often gets me in a tangle before I even start, so I don't start.  This is an effort to avoid some of that.

Anyway, this more or less speaks for itself.  It's rough and ready, but I also used a very small amount of reference without copying directly from any of it.  She looks a bit like Clara on Doctor Who, but that's just a coincidence since neither Clara or Jenna Louise Coleman were one of my references, though if I ever paint this properly she likely will be, because the sketch looks like her ;)

Time Taken: 170 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: Not a lot.

This is another one that's not really based on anything particular, and it also didn't really turn out anything like I was expecting it to when I started. I don't even like it that much, but it did accomplish some things when it comes to learning, so I guess it did what it needed to.  The thing I like least about it is her hair.  If I was ever going to repaint this I would change her hair completely, or give her a helmet or something.

In the step my step you can see that originally I was going to give her a swimming cap type thing, and the lighting was going to be a lot more purple.  In retrospect I should have stuck to my guns about both of those things.  Other than that, the only thing of note is that I used some filters near the end to get the grimy post-apocalyptic look that I felt it needed.  Oh, and I am quite proud of one thing; the facemask came out really well I think.

Time Taken: 20 Minutes each
Software: Photoshop
Based on: The images to the left.

I felt I should pull back a bit and focus on some aspects of my Speedpaints that I am terrible at.  These include things I usually fix as I go along, but would benefit from if I got things more accurate early.  In these three images I used a hard round Photoshop brush with no opacity.  The pressure sensitivity was controlling the size of the brush instead.

This meant I had a challenge I don't usually have - getting things right straight off the bat.  Usually if a colour is off a little I'll blend in a closer colour and then sample the result of the mix.  This then becomes the colour I use on the next stroke, slowly getting closer to a result that I like.  It's also the way I do blending - mix in a little of another colour, and then sample, paint, sample again, paint, and so on.

In this case I couldn't do that - each stroke had to be right (or as close as I could get it).  Not first time - I'm not crazy, I was allowed to erase and undo, but much more accurate than I usually worry about.  Of course mistakes that had me resorting to undo and erase took up time, and I'd limited myself pretty strictly to 20 minutes per study, and each image was quite small, fitting into a square of 256 x 256 pixels. These are the results, along with the images I based them on

Time Taken: 15 Minutes each
Software: Photoshop
Based on: The images to the left.

And here are some more - Unlike the previous bunch these ones are done with the Polygon Lasso and Fill tools.  I'm trying to break the images up into their fundamental shapes.  The accuracy isn't as high as I'd like because this is surprisingly tricky, especially with the even more limited time (15 minutes instead of 20).  I also ran out of time before I got half the elements in the final one done (perspective always slows me down something terrible).  Still these were valid experiments, and ones I'll probably do again some time.

Time Taken: 125 Minutes
Software: Paintstorm (120 Minutes) Photoshop (5 Minutes)
Based on: Photo of Shannyn Sossamon, found on Pinterest

So I bought a new art package to speedpaint with.  It's brand new, and really, really cheap, so I thought I'd give it a go.  It's not bad at all, especially for the price.  Go show your support and buy a copy if you're into this sort of thing (or at least try it, which is free).  The downside is that it is pretty early in the development process, so it's got some bugs still, and some features are missing that you might expect. It also ties itself to one computer, so you can't have it on your desktop and your laptop without buying it twice, which is a shame.

The image above had a few minutes spent on it in Photoshop too.  This is the only place I'm showing this Photoshop treated version at the moment.  You can see the less filtered version here, if the one in the step through isn't enough for you.

And really I don't have a lot to say about the process itself - it went fairly cleanly, and the most exciting thing about it (other than being with new software) was that I used a set of calipers for the measurements instead of a grid or other means. The calipers are fairly cool because I wanted plastic ones I could hold right up to the monitor without scratching it, and I've never been able to find any.  The solution was really obvious once I thought about it for two minutes - I made some out of Lego pieces ;)  Not used them since though - I should try to rectify that very soon.

Pink Petals

Another way of catching up on the blog a bit is to just post more, so two in one day (if you missed the previous one due to my posting twice in a day being an unusual occurrence, it's this one here). Like the last one I'll be saying as little as possible in order to get it done in one go. This post's subject has been seen in a lesser way before, in the last speedpaint post. I said I'd get to the results soon; this is the post about it, so let's see the result.

As mentioned in the speedpaint post, this is loosely based on this photo, which I've since learned is a photograph of Argentinian actress Dolores Fonzi.  It doesn't look much like her, but it wasn't meant to - I just liked how her hair looked, but even that's been changed a bit, as you can see.  This doesn't mean I won't do an actual portrait of her some time in the future though.

So the starting point was the original unfinished speedpaint.  The first step was to do some cleanup, and start fixing some things that bothered me about her features, especially how puffy she looked around the right side of her face and chin (it's not an ugly thing particularly, it's just not what I wanted).  You can see where I did this by just painting a darker area over there, without yet matching it to her hair color.  Revising her face continued through most of the following images - I'm fairly pleased with the end result.

More revision in the left picture, but not much else.  On the right I've started to define her hair and shirt  a little more, as well as some further refinements of her features.  At this point her shirt is based on another photograph, but the end result was changed quite a lot.  I also decided on a background that was a little bolder in color.  This was supposed to be temporary, but that color made it all the way into the finished piece.

More or less completed her hair  on the left here, and added a little more color into her face.  At this point I decided I wanted her ear to be in front of her hair, which required some repainting of the hair around there, and of course painting her ear.  I didn't have a direct reference for that, so it's based on an ear seen from a different angle, and under different lighting.  I also changed the color of her shirt from teal, to a more standard blue.  Mostly I just preferred it that way, but it also matches the background better, meaning the shirt draws the eye away from her face less.

And here are some revisions of her shirt, so it no longer looks anything like the photo it was based on.  I also polished up her arm, and put it into more of an obvious shadow.

And that, apart from the addition of an earring, greener eyes, some more shirt polish and the addition of  details in  the background, is basically it.  Yes, it seems like that last step was quite a lot, but it took less time than the original failed speedpaint.  Most of the background consists of those petals for example, the most complex of which is maybe eight brushstrokes; most of them were just two or three.

Usually I just leave it at that, but I thought in this case I would put the completed one side by side with the one I started with for the sake of comparison.  I think she came quite a long way in the couple of days I spent on her.  I could have spend some more time on it and polished further, but I thought she'd be a good entry for another ArtRage contest, and the time was almost up at this point, so I submitted her and crossed my fingers.  She didn't win (honourable mention though), but another one of my pieces I'd submitted for the heck of it did come in joint-second.  Personally I think it's one of the prettier things I've ever painted.

Robots Under Lighting

Well, I certainly missed a couple of weeks there.  One of them was the July 4th weekend, so of course nothing happened that weekend except alcohol, grilled meat and small sparkly explosives (a winning combination!).  Last weekend... I have no clue - obviously last weekend occurred, but I could not with any certainty tell you what occurrences happened during it.  Possibly I did some art, I'm really not sure.

So, anyway, hopefully today I'll get some catching up done.  I think this will be done by just saying less stuff - most of what follows is basically stuff you've read before about other pieces anyway, so this one will focus on things that were slightly different.

A picture of a Robot.  Done for the DeviantArt Artrage monthly competition in May, which was themed 'Robots'.   It's one of the Robots I initially sketched for those pieces I do for my son, but it didn't get done for that, so I painted it for this in Artrage instead.

The initial sketch, blown up, just like the previous ones.  Unlike the previous ones I did a cleaned up sketch of it to work from (just sketched over the original scan).  This was done in artrage using the Ink Pen tool.  In the end it didn't prove terribly useful, but I later used the original sketch.

Adding flat color, and then reducing the opacity of the ink layer and starting to fill in some of the lighting information.  I was tempted to do a very polished piece, using airbrush and such, but then decided (by this point) that having it look more like a children's book illustration would work better with the style of the robot itself.  The red tone of the shadow was because I knew the heart would be glowing red, and the light would probably bounce around because this robot is metal.

More lighting basically, including the first pass at the background.  As reference for that I pulled out an old render I'd done of a car sitting on a 'backcloth' in a spotlight.  Gave me a pretty reasonable idea of what angle the light cone would be at, and then I modified it to suit.  I also added some reflection of the ball, and some bounce light from it.  I have no idea if those are accurate - it just looked good.

Incidentally, since metal is a surface made up entirely of reflections, for this to look like this in reality it would require something like a white drop cloth behind the camera, that was itself illuminated, but that would then add more fill light than shown here.  So yes, I know that, and I don't particularly care as I wasn't going for realism.

These are basically the final stages.  I added the lights, and the lighting for the ball, as well as his antenna.  I wanted the smile to look like an old LCD display (like you'd get on a digital watch).  To do that I drew the mouth as pixels, added the grid to look like pixel cells, and then painted a very slight shadow under the mouth pixels.  After that I just lit the screen to hide most of the grid.  It worked quite well I think.  At this point I also pulled the original sketch back in and blurred it slightly.  This worked quite well to simulate a little ambient occlusion and give the little guy some solidity.

To reach the final result I made the background a bit choppier and added some noise overall, as well as the border.  The majority of the piece was done using the Oil Paint tool. Some of the stages, such as the glow around the lights, were done using a very drippy Airbrush, or sketched over with the Pastel brush.  the background was softened with the Palette Knife, and the overall noise once again added with a low intensity drippy Airbrush.

The picture won the competition by the way, so I'm glad I did it even if it's very different from my usual fair.

Oh, and I thought I'd posted this before, but I guess not.  I did another Robot picture for my Son's birthday, which is now framed and hung on his wall.  We'd noticed during the year that one of the pencils I'd used to do one of the previous ones fluoresces under blacklight (my son thinks UV lights are amazing, so we'd had one in his bedroom briefly to see how different surfaces reacted).  With that in mind this particular Robot was done specifically with pencils that had the same effect, so the whole thing is also a blacklight picture.  Might come in handy when he's a teen and has the obligatory Blacklight around all the time.  Might mean he'll keep his old man's cute robot pictures around a little longer than he otherwise would.

This is a scan of the actual picture, and a simulated blacklight version (the colors pulled off a photograph of the actual picture under blacklight, which was otherwise too blurry to show).  The process for creating this was basically the same as the previous set, other than ensuring the pencils would all fluoresce.