Painting at the Speed of Fail

Clearly I lied in the last post and did not get to writing another, until now.  I should stop trying to predict the future in my posts, because it's shocking how often things I predict don't come to pass.  Or maybe I should predict things I don't want to happen, so there's a lower possibility of them occurring.  Either way, here I am again with another update on some speedpaints, only two months after I actually did them.  Back to December for this round.  For the sake of my schedule though I'll try and keep this one fairly short.  On the other hand though, videos!

Time Taken: 25 Minutes
Software: Photoshop

It's a monster taking a selfie.  What more do you need?

Time Taken: 90 minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: http://fav.me/d4q8kuy from randomactscreative.com

Loved the lighting and colour on the original reference, so I had a go at recreating it.  I also had a go at capturing one of those fancy  timelapse videos, and finally got it working out.  So, no step by step, just a video.  Fun.

So as you can see, I have the original image open on the left while I paint on the right.  I used to have the reference open on my right monitor while I painted on the left one, but since I've started working with a Cintiq having a reference on my other monitor is only good for the occasional glance, so this works out better.

I have the images set to the same resolution, which means I can zoom in and then scale the other one to match with a keyboard shortcut.  You'll see my cursor appearing over the original image fairly regularly, especially at the start - this isn't me colour sampling it (I didn't sample any colours from the original here), but rather how I measure it.  Hover over a point, and then flick my hand to a second point.  Do that a couple of times and then use the muscle memory to do the same on the other window, but this time while drawing a stroke.  It's not as accurate as measuring properly, or using a grid, but it is fast and usually close enough.

If it's worth me doing more of these (there's another one along in a minute), let me know in the comments (you may need to brush aside some cobwebs down there).

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: Photoshop

Not a finished piece by any means, but what I'm hoping to do more of from now on.  A piece from which I could develop something more finished from should I want to.  It's not really based on anything specific, though the pose is similar to one I saw on Pinterest.  Mostly I was just interested in blending some Medieval looks with some sci-fi tech.

I don't love the piece, but I quite like the outfit for the most part (not sure about the stomach region though, but it's better than just showing a midriff I suppose).

Time Taken: 190 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: A photo I took in St. Petersburg

Part of my Designated Area series, this is from where I had to stand outside the hotel if I wanted a smoke.  There were more people around in the original, but I left them out to save time.

Due to jetlag I was outside at some fairly strange times of day.  Twice while I was out there I encountered a young woman seemingly taking her horse for a walk.  She offered to let me ride it for a fairly small price.  I'm not sure this would have been pleasant for the horse - I'm a pretty big guy, and it was a fairly small horse - so I declined.  The young woman did not seem terribly impressed by that.  I was mostly impressed that she started off speaking English, but I suppose there's a reasonable chance a tired looking white guy standing outside a St. Petersburg hotel at 4am is a jetlagged visitor who speaks at least some English.

Time Taken: 130 Minutes
Software: ArtRage
Based On: A photo of our Foster Dog, Molly

We fostered a dog for a week after Christmas.  She ended up going to a new forever family after that, because right now we don't have time to introduce a dog into our lives full time (I can barely find time to write blog posts!).  Anyway, if it wasn't for our schedules we might have taken her ourselves because she was the most ridiculously well behaved Dog I've even met.  OK, enough about Molly, here's another video, this time from Artrage.

As you can see, I use a quite similar setup in ArtRage as I do in Photoshop.  Ref to the left, paint to the right.  The main difference is that I can't easily scale the ref to match the canvas size (I left the bit where I try and get them close at the beginning out of the video).  There are a couple of jumps here and there - that's where my recording ran out and I didn't notice to start it up again for a minute or so.  You'll note I moved one of here eyes at one point - I like to avoid doing that, but I quite liked how the eye looked, and didn't want to repaint it.  I think this one is recorded at a more frequent rate than the previous one, so you're seeing it at a slower speed.

And that's it for today!  No promises, but I'll try to be back before the end of the month so I'm only posting paints after a maximum of a month, rather than two (ugh, I can barely remember painting half of these ;))

A Musing 6: Another Mickey Mouse Job

Way back when, in the mists of blog history (well, this blog's history) there was a post in which I said something that seemed true at the time.  Time has passed, as has a great deal of water under the bridge (That's two metaphors in one paragraph, I'll try not to make a habit of it).

Since writing  that post I've been meaning to cover what I said in more detail, but as I've attempted to do so I've stalled at doing it.  Since I really do want to cover it though I've decided to break it down into a few smaller chunks, each one being a blog post.  This post is a prelude to those, and is relevant to them.  If you missed the link to the last relevant post up there and want to catch up click here.

So what I said, in those misty times, was this:

"There are only a limited number of ways it is possible to get an image from your noodle and onto a piece of paper"

I then proceeded to list 6 ways of doing just that (I'm not going to list them again right now - we'll get there lower down).

Now, I still believe the list is basically accurate.  The post I listed them on is still by far the most popular on the blog (three times as many views as the next most popular), but noone has ever posted a comment to say that the list is inaccurate (and as we know, comments on this blog are not what you'd call common).

Fairly accurate the statement may be, but there are probably some caveats and refinements that can be made now, three and a half years later.

So, the list, as given in the original post: 

1. Draw it raw, using what memories you have of the thing, and the vision in your mind and trying to draw that on the paper.
2. Use references to bolster your memories and aid with the transferal of what you are trying to create from your mind to the paper.
3. Copy from a reference, making changes as needed to alter the reference to your vision.
4. Copy it directly, assuming the image represents exactly what you want to draw.
5. Trace over a reference making changes as needed to alter your tracing to your vision.
6. Trace it exactly

A couple of those are basically the same thing, but with "Doing it exactly" and "Modifying as needed," added to them.  There's more granularity than that I think, and I'll cover some of that in the future posts, but for breaking down into convenient titles I'm going to slim the list down into the following:

1. Tracing
2. Copying
3. Referencing
4. Knowing

It's a shame there are no vowels in there, or I could do a mnemonic.  I could insert one, al-la CHiPs, and get...  I don't know, TRaCK or something.  Actually, TRaCK's not bad...

So even beyond the granularity, there are some grey areas between those.  If you look at something, and then draw it an hour later, is that Referencing, or Knowing (pretty sure you couldn't say it was copying even if you were trying to replicate it as accurately as you could when you drew it)?  And of course it's possible to combine all of those techniques in one final image, but I'll cover that in more detail some other time.

To save some controversy later on I'll quickly define what I mean by each of those to refer back to in the later ones.  By the way, up until I started this post I hadn't drawn Mickey Mouse since the original list was made.  He's getting drawn again for this post as a fairly good example of each of the TRaCK points.

TRACING
Most people know what tracing is, or at least think they do. For the purposes of the blog I'm defining it very specifically as drawing anything over an image, be it onto tracing paper or a Photoshop layer.  That's exactly what you thought it was isn't it?  Fine, carry on then.  You probably also think it's cheating.  There's a guy over here who'd like a word with you about that (and no, it's not me in the post I linked to before that you totally didn't go and read.  See?  I'm on to you).

Here's a couple of pictures of Mickey Mouse I just traced in Photoshop.  Yes, I know that one doesn't look like Mickey Mouse, that's sort of the point, and part of what I'll be discussing in the related post.

COPYING
This I'm defining as drawing directly from a source, but not on or over a source.  This can include using mechanical means and other measuring devices. Well, that one was easy.

Here's a picture of Mickey Mouse I just copied.  I'm getting bored of drawing Mickey Mouse to be honest.

REFERENCING
Referencing I'm taking to mean using existing images and using them to make informed choices while drawing.  The drawing could be of the same thing from a different angle, or something completely different and (seemingly) unrelated to the reference.  It doesn't have to be vastly different to the reference to count as being referenced rather than copied.  Also, looking at something in the morning and trying to replicate it in the afternoon?  I'm considering that referencing too, as the next day you might not be able to replicate it again, so you don't really know it.

An original (and terrible) picture of Mickey Mouse  (I'm writing this before I've actually drawn it, so I'm just assuming it's going to be terrible), created using references.  Also a picture I drew a day after looking at a picture of Mickey Mouse, for 6 seconds, the day after drawing the one below... Try reading that when drunk!

KNOWING
This is where you know something so well you can just draw it without needing to see it at all.  The vast majority of people know how to draw a smiley face, or a stick figure, for example.  Grab a pen or a pencil right now and draw a smiley face, and a stick man, and a flower, you'll see what I mean.  This doesn't mean what you're creating is perfect - You just ignored my request to draw a stick man or smiley face I'm sure, but if you had done them they might be good, they might be bad, but they are recognisable to someone else as being what you intended, and you didn't use anything to refer to (and why would you? Because you didn't do it.  Slacker).  For all that though, if you tried to draw a picture of, say, your mother, and you're not a portrait artist who draws their mother regularly as practice or something, then it's probably not going to be immediately recognisable as being an illustration of her.  There are reasons for this, and you can find a nice write up of some of the reasons at this here link to an article on io9 - it even uses Mickey Mouse as an example too.

Another terrible attempt at drawing Mickey, done before I started on this post, and went and grabbed links from the other Mickey Mouse post (so as not to see it and ruin the point that I don't know how to draw him.  I think it looks oddly similar to my last attempt at Mickey without reference from three years ago, with just a few refinements that get it slightly closer.

So that's all on this for now - I'll start breaking down each of those subjects in more detail soon.  I wonder if this post will be as popular as the last one featuring the worlds most famous rodent.  Time will tell I guess - I'll get back to you about it in three and a half years.  Incidentally, it's the blog's 4th birthday in 10 minutes.  So I'm off to eat some cake - Happy Birthday Blog!

Robots Under Pressure

It's been a slightly packed couple of weeks.  It was my Son's birthday yesterday, and that will be the focus of this post (completely skipping over two other things I need to blog about, not including the sketching posts I have still failed to get to). The day before I had an important presentation at work (I wasn't doing the presenting, but it was my work - along with others - being presented, if that makes sense), and that might eventually be the focus of a post in about 5 years time.  Anyway, those two things were a day apart, and I was given the task for each of them a day apart as well, about 2 and a half weeks ago.

For work it was that I'd taken a screenshot of something from just the right angle that it looked good, and it was suggested that it be shown off at this presentation. Except not a still shot from just that angle.  What I was working on was in no-way ready to be presented in that way, but I said sure anyway, and then set out to make sure it wasn't horrible.  It was more work than I'd anticipated, but such is life.  I can't go into any additional detail, except that getting it to a state I was (fairly) happy to show took late nights and last weekend. This is not a complaint - it's just something that goes along with the job sometimes.  On it's own, not a big deal.

The day after this came up my wife suggested I do something for my Son's birthday.  He's been on a kick to get a picture of a Cute Robot for a while, and she's been looking at pictures on Etsy and such.  I'm generally loath to buy something I could do just as well myself (which isn't much to be honest), so she said "well, why don't you do one...  Or more?"  We ended up deciding on 7. She said 4 to 6, and I pointed out that since he was turning 7 it should be 7.  You may note there are only 6 below - explanation to follow.

Click to enlarge images, as usual.

Anyway, I had no idea if I could even do them since it's not like I have a history of drawing cute Robots.  Clearly I could do it to a degree, you can see the results above, but 2 weeks ago I had no clue, so I got to sketching to find out.

I sketched in the evening for a couple of days, and came up with a bunch of robots of slightly varying styles.  Mostly I was going for the classic cute robot vibe of the 50's, but there's some slightly different stuff in there too.  They weren't drawn in as orderly a manner as this obviously - They're scattered around about 4 sketchbook pages in all sorts of orientations - I've just laid them out like this here for easy viewing.

I had one rule when sketching - I could look at all the robots and reference I wanted until I actually picked up a pencil, at which point other Robots were off the table for reference.  Everything else was fair game though - the Robot with the wings was based on a squirt bottle for example.  The animals in the lower right were from reference, and I drew them in order to have something else to place in an image if I needed to. Just as well I did as my wife wasn't keen on the wet tiger, so he got switched to a cute baby penguin instead.

That tiger pic may get done yet though - cats and Robots seems to be pretty common (as do robots with hearts and robots with balloons - these are all cliche stacked to the heavens), so I thought it would be funny if it was a tiger instead.  I mean what's a tiger going to do to a robot?  Behave more or less like a regular cat to a human is my guess.  I think it's sweet, so I may use the idea at some point in the future one way or another.  That Robot with the leash and umbrella is based on a Davy Lamp we have by the way.

After sketching I did a mockup of how the finals might look.  This was for two reasons; firstly I wanted to make sure the idea might actually work when done on toned paper, and secondly I wondered how difficult it would be to hack something together if it turned out I sucked at drawing them for real (did I not mention that - those are all physical, not digital pieces, except for this mockup).  Turned out okay, but I figured I'd have to do more work on them than this if I did them digitally.

My wife had picked out her nine favourites at this point, and had the list ordered.  I had a choice of ways to transfer them from sketches to final 8x10 images,  and eventually settled on scanning them, blowing up the size with a printer and then tracing that over to the final paper as a guide.  Other options were using a grid (pain in the arse to erase when finished), or just re-sketching at a larger scale (too much potential for mistakes, and thus wasting my nice toned paper).

Above is the one of the seven I didn't get to because on the last day before his birthday my son had a large tantrum and put me right off bothering with it.  I did tell him he can have another if he can be good for the rest of the week, so this one may eventually see charcoal.  You can see that in this case I did resketch parts of it (on sketch paper) because I wasn't terribly happy with his head.  I also swapped out the balloon for the butterfly since two balloon robots is overkill.  I then gave the other Robot this one's heart balloon.  These got printed on regular printer paper.  I flipped some of them - this was to make tracing easier in some cases, in others it was to actually flip the result when I inked it.

And here I am drawing one of them (I adjusted the contrast on the middle image so you could see the lines after tracing - they're practically invisible otherwise).  Pretty simple setup - Traced the printed blowup on tracing paper, taped the tracing paper to the toned paper, rubbed the graphite from the tracing paper onto the toned and then proceeded to ink it (with a sharpie fine liner, although I switched to a thicker marker for Robin just to mix things up a little).  I used two shades of grey and black Prismacolor markers for large areas of tone, and then white and black charoal for the shading, except for a white gel pen for the strongest highlights.   Colour was added using Prismacolor pencils, and the penguin was filled white with a white paint marker.

Other than the borders I didn't use a ruler for any of them - I'm quite pleased about that. Each one took between 90 minutes and two hours, so not an insignificant amount of time given what else was going on - and in addition to the work thing I slipped on some ice (no major damage, just aches), got (and have) some tinnitus in my right ear, my wife's car broke down, and we suffered another bereavement just as I was beginning (we were no longer close, but I had a great deal of respect for them back when we saw each other regularly).

The only downer with the actual art was the one with the two robots holding hands ("Heart")- My fixative spray for the charcoal decided to spit all over that one, and left a stain.  It's actually a cool effect - but I would have planned something for it if I'd known in advance...

And that's that.  Me and my wife framed them, and they're ready to go on his wall.

I don't usually do this, but if you want to see them larger (and in the unlikely event you want to order prints), you can see them over on my Deviant Art page with the following links:

Balloon
Penguin
Oil
Sunflower
Heart
Robin

So, what do you think?  Did I do an okay job on these retro bots? I would not rule out doing more in the future, but it isn't currently planned beyond the possible 7th for my son.   I'll update here if that one does happen I guess.

Painting Class: Squares and Mutant Rabbits

I blame Assassin's Creed III and our cats on my lack of productivity lately (not really, it's entirely my own fault of course). The cats can prove a constant distraction, especially Ferris, who seems to be going through his kitty teen years and therefore doing the one thing he's not allowed to do, which is go on the table and counter-tops in the kitchen, and then stare contumaciously at everyone until you do something about it. He especially likes to do this repeatedly when I'm sketching and there's no-one else around, so there's more cat moving and less sketching than there should be.

Assassin's Creed III however is just a really enormous game with lots to do and fills me with conflict as it involves murdering my countrymen* in large numbers in a bid to remove them from American shores (It's set during the Revolutionary War of Independence - That's a combination of both the US and UK names for it if you were wondering).

You're not here for excuses though, you're here for ART. Not much to be found unfortunately, but carry on if you fancy a giggle at my expense.

Yes, it's a little sad and unfinished, some of the reasons why can be found below, as well as why I'm not terribly disheartened by it (though I am a little embarrassed).  The photo quality is dreadful - I'll need to work on that if I want to post paintings from now on - ugh.

Nine weeks ago I started an eight week painting class. Some of you may recall my last attempt at painting way back in January. I was planning to have another go soon after, but I realised that I really had no clue what I was doing and should probably take a class to at least learn the basics such as how to mix paint and handle a brush.  It took me almost ten months to get there, but I finally did it.  Cost a fortune too - not the class, all the paint.  Good paint is expensive!  If I paint a picture with a lot of red I'll need to take out a loan (Cadmium red is particularly pricey, although you can get a hue version which is cheaper).

I didn't bore anyone with my background beyond what my job is, so it was nice not being in a situation where anyone expects you to actually produce something spectacular (and them being subsequently disappointed), especially since I really know next to nothing about actual paint.

The first few weeks were spent painting simple things, such as a colour wheel and some transitions between various shades and colours. I'm not going to scan those in as one colour wheel is much like another, except mostly better than mine, you'll just have to use your imagination (or possibly google if you don't know what a colour wheel looks like).

That's me painting squares. I think I was painting transitions between various yellows and blues and blacks to make green. I didn't know mixing black with yellow would give some excellent greens prior to this (that's the sort of thing I took the class for).  Actually, no, I lie, it's me painting transitions between complimentary colours - the greens were the week after.

So on week three we started on a still life. We had a choice of two, and I chose the bunny one, because who doesn't like a bunny? The photo above is from week six of the class because I forgot to take one the first two weeks we were painting this.

I roughed it out in pencil and started painting. Then the next week I painted some more. I forgot to get a picture of the painting the first week as well, so this is how it looked on the second week of work.

After that I... you guessed it, painted some more. It's worth noting that the class was one day a week for three hours (about 2 to two and a half hours of that was painting), and between sessions the still life was struck and then put back for the next time. There were a lot of variables that could move, and did. You'll note the ribbon in my picture, and some of the locations of things is different than those in the photograph. That's because they moved, as did the light, as did I. I could blame all that on my Rabbit looking a bit wonky (because he was at a slightly different angle each week), but in all honesty I'm pretty sure I sketched him in a little wonky and a little fat, so it's far more my fault than any slight variations in position.

I'm not particularly pleased with it, but the rest of the class seemed to like him, mutated though he is. Apparently the colours I chose for him are appealing and his eye went down well (with a nice Chianti and some fava beans, probably).

Despite having little desire to finish it, and not being happy with the current result, I'm still pleased I did it because I learned a lot in the process. Some of which will hopefully be reflected in my next piece (It's in progress - the class has finished but I have a little more to do on it before I'll call it done). One of the things I learned was that painting for real takes a lot longer than painting digitally. Most of that time, for me, comes down to mixing the paint. Digitally you just pick the colour you want and go at it, but real media takes time to mix for every single variation - there were quite a few colours here, so it took a while (~6-8 hours total?). If I was painting this digitally it would be a lot faster - I'm guessing I could speedpaint it in 90 minutes without issue, and probably more accurately as it's easier to fix mistakes... I may even do that at some point.

Still, painting from life rather than photographs also has it's challenges, and I don't do nearly enough working from life in general. Maybe this will inspire me to do more of it in future.

So Turkey-Day is fast approaching, and I'll be away for that. I'll try and get some sketching done. When I get back I have something to keep me busy for about a week (not going to spoil it too much, but it's another Doctor Who picture, my last for a while), then I'll finish my next painting from the class and post a write up. Somewhere in there I'll get October's meager sketching scanned so you can see that too. Things to look forward to, or dread - I'm almost back to full speed again though I think, and that can't be a bad thing.

Sorry for the large amounts of text and small amount of pictures this post - but not half as sorry as my fingers, because they had to type it all.



*That's my actual countrymen by the way, not the character's countrymen, and a distressingly large number of the rooftop guards seem to be specifically Welsh and yell things at you like "Oi, get down! Are you deaf? Ge'down before I come over there!" Which is slightly creepy and uncannily accurate as I'm usually yelling the exact same thing at the cat. I'm starting to sound like my Dad...

A Bit Like William Hague

So this one, like "And a Small Hat" before it, started life as a speedpaint. Unlike the previous piece this one was finished and posted before I decided to go back and fix "just that one bit." In fact you've already seen the speedpaint in the previous post, but you'll see it again below.
The end result of all this was one of the best pieces I think I've ever done, it just worked out really well.

Click to Enlarge

It started out back when I was looking for something to paint on Deviant Art. Often the way I do this is just a random search (or no search) with the parameters set to Stock Art and Newest. This little chap popped up on the first page and I thought it was nice, so I clicked the thumbnail and opened this picture of a French Bulldog. I immediately knew I had to paint him, though I had no thoughts beyond it being a quick speedpaint at the time.

Unusually for me I saved the speedpaint several times through that first hour. This was because in retrospect I really wished I'd done the same for the Han Solo one I'd done previously. That worked out because now you can see the progression to that first point.

So I posted it in my usual places and went about with my day, but unlike most speedpaints this one kept nagging at me. I'd managed to mess up the eye and I knew it, but ran out of time before I could do much about it.

"I could just go back and fix that eye," I thought, "no time limit." So at the end of the day when my son was in bed I went back and did just that. Spent longer than I'd meant to (despite the "no time limit" thing) and put an hour or so into his eye and the surrounding area, which resulted in this...

Which looked really good. I probably could have left it there and still been happy with it - the focus is drawn to the eye allowing the rougher parts to simply inform the brain and let it do the work (unless you look right at them of course). I couldn't leave it though, I had to go and fix the snout...

Then the mouth...

Then the ear...

And at that point the upper head was polished enough that I had to give at least some love to the rest of him, but intended to keep the lower half rough, even if not quite as rough as it was at the time.

I had quite a bit of trouble with the neck here. Getting the right balance of bounce light and the right level of detail in the fur turned out to be the hardest thing in the entire painting. In fact I kept working on it through the next step.

Here I've blocked in the rest of the body - it's low detail as the eye isn't supposed to focus there at all. I've also added in all the little hairs that stick out all over the place. There are a few around the snout of course, but also a lot of them around the inside of the ear. I've begun to polish up the background here too. I quite liked the colours (although I did describe them to my wife as being "a bit like baby poo"), but I've had the same basic background since the beginning and I've grown tired of it, so at this point I wanted to alter it a little.

After this I muted the colour a little in the background (same colours, just desaturated) and then dripped some of my "splats" on it with the brush I still have left over from the card I did for my best friend, before smearing them a little to give a sort of dripped watercolour look to it. I think the only other thing I did was add eyelashes and sign it.

I'm still not 100% happy with it (am I ever?) but I do believe it's probably the best piece I've done thus far, so I'm still showing some progress.

Why is the post called "A bit like William Hague"?  It's because someone joked that it looked like him, and you know what? He really does!  Is it ironic the the British Foreign Secretary looks like a French Bulldog?  I'll let you decide (it so is).

Finally, since I didn't upload this one at it's full resolution, here's a snippet of the picture as it was originally painted:

And Then Two Come Along At Once!

It's been ages since I've done a speedpaint, but it's been even longer since I actually posted any. Time to make amends.

In fact I have far more to post than I thought I would. In my addled brain I was under the impression that I'd posted some at the end of January, but I didn't. Given this, and the similar comments I've made in the last two posts I have to assume I had a particularly vivid dream where I went on a posting frenzy. You know, the sort where you wake up and think it actually happened? Happened to me yesterday in fact; I dreamed it was Monday, woke up, panicked because I was late for work and then realised it was Saturday. Typical.

Time Taken - Various (Between 2 and 20 each)

Various studies for a painting I was planning on before the world went mad. I may come back to it one day, but for now I may as well post the studies before I forget all about them. Yes, that's predominantly Solid Snake from the Metal Gear series.

Time Taken - 45 Minutes

This one was an experiment into painting flesh tones and bounce light and things.  I didn't "finish" it as you can see, but I thought it came out quite well anyway.

Time Taken - 50 Minutes

We had a dog randomly turn up at our house back in January. Cute little King Charles Spaniel looking lost. We (well, my Wife and Son) did a tour of the neighborhood looking for his owners but no dice. Son wanted to keep the dog, but of course we had to call Animal Control and have it taken away. A note to non-Americans, "Animal Control" sounds like they come with flamethrowers and wearing hazmat suits yelling for people to "stand back from the animal", this is not the case - the animal control guy was very nice, wore a shirt and drove a small white van.

Anyway, I dubbed him Toby while he was here due to his resemblance to my friends late dog, but it turned out his name was Butterscotch. I don't know about you, but if I was a boy dog and my owners called me Butterscotch I'd run away too. Incidentally, I think this is my best speed paint so far. Your mileage may vary.

Time Taken - 30 Minutes

This is what happens when I speedpaint with no reference of any kind. Not the worse thing ever, but not very inspiring either.

Time Taken - 10 Minutes

I took my glasses off to clean them and caught my reflection in the monitor - decided to try painting it without the specs.  Not a great work of art, but you can tell it's me at least.

Incidentally, I had my eyes tested recently and the optician asked me what the first row I could read without my glasses was.  I couldn't read any of them, so he scrolled down and down, the letters getting bigger as he went.  Eventually he ran out of letters to scroll through and I still couldn't read any - just saw a big blurry blob.  Put my glasses back on, and what's on the screen that I can now read?  A gigantic 'E' and nothing else.  How sad.

Time Taken - 45 Minutes

An experiment using the pallete knife in ArtRage - 4 blobs of paint smeared around for 45 minutes (plus a couple of minor touchups on the face and highlights).

I actually took a note of the source for this one (I usually forget too, terrible I know).

Time Taken - 45 minutes

Not a particularly good one, but quite relaxing to paint. More experimenting. This time painting without zooming or panning, and mixing the majority of the colour on the canvas itself. I may do a better piece from the same source one day. It's from a screengrab of Project Runway if you're curious, but I don't remember which one - it's probably from one of Tom and Lorenzo's awesome dissections of the show though.

Time Taken - 40 Minutes

This was a study I did right before starting on Annette's profile pic.  I'd never drawn or painted a horse before that I can recall, so it seemed like a good idea to have a couple of dry runs.

Time Taken - 45 Minutes

Based this on a picture that came up in a search for the word Stall (I was doing the horse research at the time). Liked it, decided to paint it, but it was pretty late so I gave up before I had to paint all the people. Sorry people. Here's the link to the reference picture.

Time Taken - 45 Minutes

March 1st is St. David's Day; the Patron Saint of Wales.  Since I'm Welsh this is a day that has some significance, and, since you probably aren't aware, the Red Dragon is the symbol of wales (I believe Wales is the only country with a dragon on its official flag - it's a red one of course).  Anyway, painted this on February 28th to celebrate the occasion.

And here's another link to the source image (I must be getting better at making a note of them)

That's your lot for today.

Oh, okay, one more thing.  One of the lovely people on the Art Rage forums called Moosie was asking for advice regarding a portrait of his Granddaughter, so of course I had to stick my nose in and give an example.  Here's the resulting sketch.  I'm posting it here because I quite like it and I've yet to think of where else I could sensibly put it on the blog.

And I think that's something quite nice to end on, don't you?

Social Profiling № 4: Annette

Up until last week I knew bugger all about She-ra. Actually, that's not entirely true; I knew that she existed (in a not existing because she's fictional kind of way), I knew roughly what she looked like, and I knew she was the Princess of Power (and Eternia) and sister of He-Man. How I knew even this is a mystery to me as I've never seen an episode of the cartoon, or seen one of the action figures (as far as I can recall). I have to wonder if she made guest appearances on He-Man and I know her from those, in much the same way as Dora the (bloody) Explorer and Go Diego Go (hell of a name that) turn up on each others shows and yell at each other for half an hour at a time while solving simple issues in the most complicated way imaginable*.

Anyway, I knew very little about her, but this is no longer the case thanks to Annette, as you will see...

Click it for ENORMITUDE!

Yes, She-Ra is blonde, so clearly this is not really She-Ra. It is Annette in the last of the set of four profile pictures I decided to do for friends on Facebook (if you missed them you can find the others here, and here, and also here).

I've known Annette since forever. That's not actually true,but I've known her long enough that I have no recollection of meeting her for a first time. I know it was long before she turned 18 because she turned 18 on the same trip to Florida that Owain did, and I'd known her for some years prior to that. So we go back a ways.

Despite this I know probably as much about her as I did about She-Ra. Isn't that terrible? Oh, I know a lot about who she was, but much less about who she is now. Since we last really hung out (no, not like that, just platonic) lots has happened - it's been a looooong time. Far too long now I come to think of it. Anyway, the upshot of this is that I was left with a conundrum when it came to painting her picture. What to paint it of (You know the answer to this because you've seen it, but bare with me 'k)?

I could take the easy way out and just paint a picture directly from a nice profile pic (as I did with Owain, something I've already mentioned regretting), but that wasn't appealing.  At one point I was going to do her stepping out of the TARDIS (stop it will you? Platonic remember?), but while that was a reasonable idea it wasn't a great one, so I moved on. Eventually, after fretting over it for a while, I looked through the available pictures again and saw this one:

Now this time around I was tired, and the thumbnail made it look as though the fillies right ear was a Unicorn horn.  This seemed promising.  Then I found another profile pic of She-Ra (I can only assume it was from when everyone put up a favourite comic/cartoon character as a profile pic just before Christmas).  Even more promising!  Did She-Ra ride a white horse?  I had vague notions that she may have even ridden a Unicorn.  I looked it up.

She did have a white unicorn... With Rainbow wings.  Called Swift Wind.

I'll wait while that sinks in. Yes, She-Ra's horse was named after a quick chuff. You can't make this stuff up - although clearly someone did.

Anyway, other than having the universe's most flamboyant steed She-ra turns out to be a bit of a badass, and she sports a nice dress to boot. My course was set; Tonight Mathew, Annette will be She-Ra (That's a British reference by the way - Trust me non-Brits, they're rolling in the isles... oh never mind).

Firstly though I had to do something about the horse. It's a beautiful horse, but it's not particularly lively. Some reference hunting was needed. While I was at it I got a different picture of Annette, and references for the wings and dress and so on. Here are the most relevant.

Once I had that lot I started sketching.  The initial sketch was OK, but I didn't have photo of Annette open at the time, so I threw in a head from memory.  Once I'd bothered to dig out her mugshot I went back and fixed it.  Turns out Annette has a really difficult face to draw.  You can see she's very attractive from the photos, but she's got one of those faces that is hard to capture.  One pencil line's width off and your left with a picture that looks nothing like her.  I struggled with it for quite some time.  Eventually I said "Hell with this, I'll just trace her face!", brought in the photo to trace, scaled it and lined it up only to discover that the one I'd drawn already was pretty much exactly the same, just her hair line was wrong.  So I didn't trace it after all since her hairline would be hidden anyway. Hurm.

Here's the final sketch I worked from if you're interested:

So from there the rest was just painting. Rather than post a lot of images I'll just do that thing with the Animated gif so you can see the progression. Like so:

And there you have it.

I'm not totally happy with the results to be honest. Her anatomy is a little off, It doesn't look quite as much like her as I would have liked, the gold is a little unimpressive and her belt and leg are wonky, but I learned a lot and Annette seems to like it, which are the important things.

I did cheat a little with the colour correction (Where the dress and horse pop from grey to white in the image there). It was that or do a lot of repainting, and I was feeling lazy. Also, feathers are sods to paint, just so you know.

So the experiment is at an end. I may do it again some day, and I may paint some of those who weren't chosen as one of the four just for fun, although in those cases it'll be just a speed paint of a photo rather than a custom job. These really took somewhat longer than I'd intended - but I hope you'll agree that the extra time was worth it.

Incidentally I clearly lied when I said I'd have something to post between the final two social profiling posts. I have no defense (Other than illness and a weakness for video games), I've been slacking. I vowed to myself that I would do something creative every day, and I have done just that - unfortunately not all of it is "artistic" in the manner that would end up on the blog here. That said, I have some other things to post, I just haven't done it yet...

* If you hadn't realised already, I dislike Dora and Diego with a passion, but I'll sit through it with my Son. I do tend to spoil it for him a bit by pointing out the stupidity of digging under a wall when you could just go over it - or even around it as it's only 10 feet long... or was that Mickey? I should stop now shouldn't I?