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.

Even More Board: The Hunters

As predicted, nothing got done last week. We had friends over for the weekend, and a BBQ on Saturday with lots of friends over. A lot of fun, but exhausting (so many kids!). This weekend was a little more relaxed, so new post, even if I should have written it yesterday (I actually did write it yesterday, but Blogger had an issue so I couldn't post). Today's subjects are actually from a while ago. Fortunately my wife is building a TARDIS, so that allows us to head back to the end of April for a recap*. Told you I was a bit behind. So behind in fact that this post will cover three things at once, though they're all related. This post ties in with the previous one regarding "The Most Dangerous Game", which you can recap on by clicking the title of it. That I just wrote. Back there.

All up to date? Good, let's go look at the "new" stuff.

There she is, looking all aloof and dangerous. Down below you'll see her partner in crime, the Male Hunter (who also graces the thumbnail), but you know what they say; 'the female of the species is deadlier than the male**' So we should get the most dangerous one out of the way first. In the game both the female and male hunters are actually as deadly as each other - identical in fact. They reside on opposite sides of the same card, for which these images are for. There can only be one Hunter, but the player can choose if the Hunter is male or female by flipping the card. Pretty neat. So I didn't really paint her first because she was the deadliest - rather I did her first because she was the scariest. Artistically speaking.

You see, I already knew what the male hunter looked like, having painted him once already, and I'd already more or less figured out what I wanted his pose to be (and found an excellent reference), so in theory he was going to be easy. The female one though, I had no clue. Was she young, old, ugly, pretty, fat, thin? No clue! (I'm just going to call her the Huntress from now on by the way, it's easier, though the game does not differentiate beyond the picture). So I needed to come up with a look for her. I didn't want her to be the traditional seductive busty pin-up of the pulp era, but I also wanted to at least give a nod to that. I did know I wanted her seated - lording it up over the viewer in a superior manner, so that was something to go on anyway. I also decided, eventually, that she should be somewhat femme fatale, and of indeterminate age.

Firstly I needed some reference. I could have got someone to model for me perhaps, but I felt it couldn't be all that hard to find a good picture of a woman sitting down I could mangle to get what I wanted. I actually found one very quickly, with this image from Faestock on Deviantart. You may note that the pose is about 80% there already in the image on the right, and the arm of the left image looks suspiciously like the one the huntress ended up with. I grabbed a bunch of other reference too, for clothing and the like, but that was pretty much it for the pose.

The very rough proportions (not shown here, but top of the head to the bottom of the foot, where the head should go, that sort of thing) I traced to save time. I then used a grid to fill the details in, but made several small changes as I went.  Why grid when I already traced - well, the tracing, rough as it was, mostly just aided me in not having to count grid squares to figure out where the side of her face might fall, that sort of thing.  Obviously the grid wasn't going to help much with clothing and such, so those I had to figure out as I went along. The outfit is reasonably authentic for a woman in a 'masculine' role during the 1920s through to the '40s, and the shirt and black tie give her a slightly facist air I think. Tyler was a little concerned (rightly) that her ears being pushed out by the helmet, and the upturned nose made her look like a pig. I assured him I was just worried about proportion and the locations of the features at this point, and she wouldn't look like a pig when she was finished. I traced the gun directly from an image I found online, and then made some small alterations so the perspective matched a little better.

The central image is of the initial underlayer, and you can see it's pretty simple stuff. Unusually though I was working with a predetermined palette I'd worked out to keep everything harmonious. Amazingly, with one small exception, this did not bite me on the behind later, and I think it worked out pretty well.

The first pass on the trousers and shirt went pretty smoothly. another thing I'd decided in order to give it a feel that fit with the early 20th century was to try and evoke a little J.C. Leyendecker. Not try and copy his extremely distinctive style (that would be a pointless task - I'm not up to that challenge), but just make nods to it. The obvious hatching of the colour in parts (especially on the trousers) is part of this - though Leyendecker does this very differently, it's enough to evoke the era I think (there's a more obvious homage to his work a little later on). This style was quite new to me, but put me in mind of something falling somewhere between the hatched inkwork and 8-bit style pixel art I've done in the past.

Not a lot extra to add for these steps, although I did reach the conclusion in the second image that I should leave at least some of the lines from the original sketch visible in the final to add a little definition to some areas. It just looked slightly better with them than without. I was, if you were interested, using a very hard round brush in ArtRage to get the more hatched paint strokes, with stylus pressure controlling the size. This is very different to my usual work flow, where I use a soft rectangular brush with the transparency being pressure controlled.

And here I take it to completion. The first and second images pretty much finish up the painting, with the third just having some cleanup, and a repositioning of the composition a little as I thought she was a little high in frame in the middle stage. The circle in the background is a slightly more overt nod to Mr. Leyendecker, and the colour of it was the only mishap I had with the defined colour palette. Originally it was more of a pale yellow, but that clashed far more than I thought it would, so I switched for this orange shade, which I think works far better.

And so that completed the Huntress. Before moving on to the Hunter though, here's a closeup of her face. You may note I switched her originally black hair for brown. No reason for this other than it looked better, if less sinister. It's also possible to see the hatching I've done with the paint better here, especially on the Helmet. For the most part she looks fairly young, but I've pushed the shadows under her eyes a little, and pulled in her cheeks, which in conjunction with the hatched style means she could be older than she might first appear.  Hopefully you'll agree she looks less porcine.

As previously mentioned, I already had a pretty good idea of how I wanted the Hunter to look.  Since I wanted this obverse side of the card to mirror the first I decided to keep the orange circle in the same location, and the background and colour palette predominantly the same.   With the exception of the jacket he's wearing more or less the same as the Huntress.  A large cravat type neckpiece, a slightly different style of helmet (both in the original image I did of him for the cover) and more masculine boots, but otherwise the same ensemble.

Since I already had quite a bit of reference from the searches done for the Huntress, along with the image that inspired the stance in the first place (a picture of Michael Caine from Get Carter) I could get on with this one more or less straight away.  Unlike the Huntress, and Despite the reference used for inspiration, the images used for reference were far too disparate to use a grid or to trace (though the clothing reference for her was of a similar type), so I sketched it in and then refined it over a few iterations.  Like the Huntress I did trace the Shotgun with some minor changes.  The hardest part was getting the face recognisably the one from the cover, though from a different angle, and in a different style.

Once I started filling in the large colour areas I pulled in the background from the Huntress so as to have it the same.  Obviously I would need to adjust the shadows later, but at this point it was enough to be getting on with.

I realised here that unlike the Huntress, where I had a singular reference I could extrapolate the lighting from, in the case of the Hunter I did not. As a result I used simple blobs of colour to represent the rough location of the lights (more like the direction the lights lay in), the first based on what little lighting I'd already painted up to that point.  From there on, like the Huntress, it was mostly a matter of filling in the coloured areas based on the lighting, with the available palette.  This time it was a little trickier of course because I kept having to work out roughly where things would be lit from.

Here's a rough process image of the head.  Fairly simple - the flat colour was laid down, and then cleaned up over a few iterations.  I cooled the orange of his flesh tones quite a bit from the initial lay-in, though the colours do poke through right to the end.  if you're curious as to the difference between the two images to the right, you'll see it's mostly just showing the changes to his neck, which looked quite peculiar being as thick as it was before.

And this takes him to completion too.  I did cheat the palette a little to give the shotgun a slight cherry stock, but I thought it wasn't so far removed as to draw the eye particularly.  I then added the boots (both the Hunter and Huntress have far rougher boots than anything else, as I found them quite difficult to get right), and pulled in the orange circle from the other image.  It needed a little work though, as I hadn't painted behind her when I first did it, so there was a big hole I had to fill in. Hardly a major problem though.

More of an issue was his belt.  Like the Huntress I gave him a Sam Brown belt, but when doing the sketch I'd made a mistake - the strap was over the jacket, the belt under it.  One could not connect to the other!  A bit of editing moved the belt on top of the jacket, as that was easier than repainting the area and removing the distortions of the strap.  After repainting the shadow (the background was all on one layer) I signed it (in his right boot, not shown here), and called it quits.

Just for the sake of completeness, here's a closeup of the Hunter's head.  You can see that like the huntress I've left the sketch in place, with some editing, to add a little depth to some of the transitions.

Finally, Tyler needed a logo for the front of the box.  I'm not going to go into the process there, as it's not particularly interesting, but this is the one arrived at.  The intention is to give it a pulp feel, while also keeping it modern and eye catching.

And that's me done.  This time I am hopeful for a return next week.

*She really is building a TARDIS - Alas I don't believe it's fully functional.
**What? Don't look at me like that, Kipling seems sort of appropriate given the subject matter.

Result Abstract May 2015

Result Abstract May 2015

(Detailed result with Marks can be seen in the earlier post )

Result Abstract May 2015

Speedy Like Sunday Morning

Speed wise, last month was a good month.  Eight paints in a month!  Now, to be fair, some of them are rather rough, but that's generally the case even when I just do the one a week, and it was also a 'long' month with an extra weekend, but still, I'm pleased - and you know how rare that is.

This month my intent, blogwise, is to post about two of the three pieces I haven't written about yet, and post another three months worth of old sketches (which should bring me up to this year).  Oh, and this post of course!  We'll see if I can manage a post every weekend then; next week is already looking iffy in that regard.

For now though, on with the speed.

Time Taken: 110 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: This Image, but larger, sort of

So I was going through my folder of 'Images I might want to base something on one day' images, that I just generally dump things I like in on occasion.  There are far more images in that folder than I will ever actually paint, and it goes back quite a long way - before pinterest in fact, where now I usually pin a copy as well as saving locally.  Anyway, there were two images in there that I liked, and couldn't decide between, so I mashed them up and then went looking online to get a link to them for this here writeup

As you might have guessed from the tiny image linked above, those images have basically disappeared from the web, but they are apparently promo images for 2 Chainz 'No Lie' (Featuring Drake) and SkullCandy.  I'm not the biggest rap fan, but I've heard a lot worse than that, and the video has lots of interesting images, of which the guy in the reference picture appears for all of 2 seconds. Since the images aren't available I'll take the rare step of uploading the mashup I worked from so you can see them.

The process images also show my trying some different things to the usual.  I had a crosshair grid for each of the two figures in the mashup, and rather than just working from that directly I just used it as a rough guide, while also trying to balance elements graphically.  You can see some of that in the first image, with the line coming down from the rough area of his nose to the front line of his shirt, though there are other lines less obvious, such as from the line of the cheekbone down to a major fold in the shirt, and the shoulders being parallel to the line of the jaw and the line of the cap.  I didn't sketch in his face in much detail, but rather just started painting at this point, since the important landmarks were already established.

The colour underlay of the shirt was intended to bring a little vibrancy to something that was otherwise just a flat grey.  My thinking was that the colours would show through a little in the end result, which turned out to be the case.  There wasn't any great thought behind the colors being green and magenta, except that those are fairly neutral shades, that would give the extra depth without driving the shirt too much into the warm or cool colour zones.

Lastly, I wasn't really sure what to do for the background, but I knew it needed something.  I picked a bright pink to go with the colour in the inside of his cap brim, and a random brush, and just did a stroke matching one of the graphic lines I'd previously defined. It worked far better than it had any right to.  The graphic blocks were done prior to the stroke, and were another randomly chosen brush (made for some experiments back on Tardis Eruditorum 5) using the foreground and background colours I just happened to have selected at the time.

Wow, I had way too much to say about that background.

Time Taken: 200 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: Lots, but predominantly this image

I really quite liked how the last image turned out, and wanted to do a companion piece for my 200th speedpaint.  Since I had a guy in the last on, I wanted a woman in this one.  the only problem was that I couldn't find an image to work from even remotely close to what I wanted, so I had to make one.  That's not usually what I do for speedpaints, at least not those I expect to end up looking reasonably good, but being the 200th paint I allowed myself 200 minutes to paint it - that's about three and a half hours, a really long time for one of these.

Since I couldn't find a good reference, I used the photo of the woman linked above (I didn't find it on that site, and I've long forgotten where I did find it), and the face and cap came from the head I didn't use from the previous image as references.  Yes, the photo I didn't use as head reference last time was of a man, but I only needed it for light, pose, and perspective reference - I used multiple other references of women to ensure a good level of feminization.

As with the last image, you can see that the step through starts with some line art, in which I try to keep the whole thing looking graphic.  Since I wanted the headphones around her neck instead of her wearing them and yet still wanted a circular graphic element, I gave her a large round earing. This ended up a lot more subtle than I originally intended, but I think it works pretty well all the same.  Where the previous image had red/pink as the accent colour, for this one I went with blue.  Other than that, and a fairly major rethink of the perspective on her face (middle image) this one went much the same as the previous one, although it took a lot longer since I had no direct reference for a lot of the elements, including those headphones and her hair.

Time Taken: 40 minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: Nothing in particular

Nothing exciting to say about this one - I was going to do a 'proper' speedpaint, but ended up noodling around with this for 40 minutes instead.  She has a gigantic forehead, but other than that, I think it's OK.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: Publicity still of Agent Coulson from Agents of SHIELD

This one was all about me trying a new method for capturing likenesses while speedpainting.  It didn't work out that well.  Oh, it looks like him, and I quite like the image, but it ends up being too time consuming for the end result. The technique, if you're curious, involves working from an intentionally blurred image to avoid focusing unintentionally on details.  There may be some potential with it, but it doesn't save all that much time.

In the process images you can see I'm laying down brighter colours again in the second image, some of which make it through to the final stage.  I've actually been doing that occasionally for a long time, but I realise I may not have mentioned it explicitly until this post.

Time Taken: 15 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: Nada

Another bout of me just noodling around.  This time I was mainly experimenting with colour, and while this didn't turn out particularly well (that's what you get for 15 minutes) the colours are interesting enough that I may revisit them at some point.

Time Taken: 70 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: Mostly this image, but also a couple of others.

A rare case of me posting an 'unfinished' speedpaint, although it's also the only 'unfinished' on that's taken over an hour.  I wasn't after a likeness with this one, I just happened to like her hair and the looking over the shoulder pose.  I was making up the colour scheme as I went, which meant it took a long time and didn't end up particularly good or interesting.  So disgusted with it was I that I closed it before saving any of the step-by-step images.  I looked at it the next day though and thought "I think there's potential here" and kept working on it, though not as a speedpaint.  The results of that I'll be posting some time soon, but up to this point at least it was a speedpaint, so it gets included here.

Time Taken: 55 minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: My own fizzog

The last time I did a self portrait was way the heck back in 2013, so I thought my profile picture on various sites could do with an update.  No grids or fancy pants stuff here, just a wet and loose oil-paint in ArtRage.  Old school speedpainting (well, old school for me), I should do it more often. It's not perfect, but it does look like me, so it does the job.

You can see here that the only thing I was particularly focused on was my eye, and to a lesser extent my ear.  I thought if I could get those about right the gaps would follow through implication.  The only other thing of interest was my attempt to imply that I hadn't shaved without painting a lot of individual hairs.  I think I succeeded on that particular point for a change.

Time Taken: 55 minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: A lot of bull

Another one that I don't have an awful lot to say about (and thank heavens, because this has been a long post).  I painted this after uploading the sketches in the previous post, because I saw the minotaur sketches and thought it might be fun to do a more traditional take.

I used some photos of bulls, and a handful of bodybuilders to paint the rough outlines, but I stopped really referencing them before I got to the second image here.  This may be why it looks more like a goat than a bull, but I care not, I still like it.  It also looks a little stiff (not like that, calm down), which I like less.  The intention was to have the head be somewhere between a bull and a man, but still more of the former than the latter (the sketches were much more man, and much less bull).

One thing I find interesting about this one is how much green I used in the image without it looking odd. Obviously the nose and ears (and a touch at the eyes) are pink, and the horns are brown/cream, and the background is almost a flat grey, but everything else is green or yellow in tint (even the outline is a slight orange).  So what started as little more than a doodle ended up being really useful in learning more about colour.

That's all for today, but I think that's quite enough.  It used to take months to build up enough for a post of this magnitude, so I've very happy with how my 'speedpaint a week' is working out.  Still a long way to go until the end of the year though,  All of which being said, I already have the first two speedpaints done for next months post, so things are generally looking hopeful.

All New Year Old Sketching: July to September '14

Despite having quite a lot to post about, I do seem to have fallen behind on the actual posting bit.  This means that for the first time in a while I have quite a few pieces that need posting about, rather than just a handful of speedpaints.  I'm not going to be doing much catching up today though, instead I'll be doing some catch up a little on the other posts I've fallen behind on - the monthly sketch update.

From here on things will be done a little differently.  Usually I scan the sketchbook pages, and then cut out things of note for the month and compose them into a new image.  This has two disadvantages though.  Firstly, it takes bloody ages, and I don't think there's really enough feedback to warrant all the work I put into it (this time sink aspect is the main reason I've fallen behind so badly).  Secondly, it means that consciously or not I end up cutting out a lot of the stuff that's crap.  This gives a false impression of my current progress (actually, my progress about 11 months ago because I'm so far behind).

To combat these issues I'm going to take to just posting the sketchbook pages mostly as they are when scanned.  There will still be some minor edits, and the colour and contrast adjusted for legibility, but instead of a couple of hours per sheet, it's more like a couple of hours per post, which is  a lot more manageable.

Edits will happen for the following reasons:

• I drew something that's directly or indirectly linked with my day job, and might get me into trouble for posting (even if you don't know that it's associated and there are no clues that it might be), or is something I'm working on outside of that job and I want to save the sketch for the final review post.
• Something I like is upside down or at some other odd angle, and I want to show it off better (this will not apply to things that are crap).
• I am so unspeakably ashamed of something I've drawn that I just can't bare to share it (this will be far rarer than editing by omission as mentioned above).
• A piece I like got cropped off during the scan (the sketchbook is larger than the scan bed by an irritatingly small amount), and I want to include it in the main image.

Other than that, you'll get the lot - including the ones where the cat sat on my arm while I was sketching, or my son injured himself headbutting the coffee table and I had to stop, or I was half awake at the time, and so on.  I won't be giving explanations (unless it's an amusing tale, which I doubt), so if it's crap, just accept that it's crap and move on - there are occasionally good things.

JULY 2014

 

 

 

Notes:  None really. This was a fair time ago, so I don't recall a lot of what I was thinking when drawing these.  There's a head profile in the middle of one of them that may be the worst profile I've drawn in recent memory though.  Yuck.  The spaceman planting a flag right at the bottom is sort of adorable though.

AUGUST 2014

 

 

 

Notes: That page with the Minotaurs might be the best single sketch page I've ever done.  No references either, which amazes me when I look at the head on the right side and the decaying fellow next to them.  Other than that, nothing terribly exciting, but quite a lot of it.

SEPTEMBER 2014

 

Notes: A very disappointing month.  I drew more than this (finishing off that half page for one), but it was mostly things for work, so you don't get to see it.  Quite like some things on the full page, such as the chubby businessman the girl in the dress and so on, but it's not exactly exceptional stuff. 

5 years at speed! 2010 - 2015

As promised this post will be a brief recap of the Speedpaints I've been doing over the past 5 years.   Some confusion has occasionally come up because of my use of the term speedpaint though, so before we review let's first define.

A speedpaint is a painting, usually digital, whereby the piece is created in a limited amount of time. It's a painting, done at speed. Simple.  Sometimes the time is decided upon before starting, sometimes there's a general maximum time beyond which it's not considered a speed painting, sometimes it's just the frame of mind the piece is created in.  Sometimes these are termed as Studies (and I do so myself in some places to reduce confusion), except a study can actually take a really long time, yet remain a study.

What they aren't, in my useage at least, are timelapses.  This is where someone records themselves painting and then they play that back at an accelerated rate. So you can see someone painting something that took 20 hours in a mere 5 minutes (or whatever).  Sometimes those are timelapses of speedpaints, and I've done a handful of those myself.  I think it's because of this that the timelapses have also become popularly known as Speedpaints (seeing someone paint, at speed),  but that's not what I mean by it.

OK, so now that's sorted out, lets go look at some, small ones, briefly.

The above is the complete record of the 198 'finished' speedpaints I've done in the last  4 years and 7 months.  I consider ones unfinished if I just gave up on them completely, or got interrupted while painting and never went back to them (I don't mind still calling something a speedpaint even if I took a break halfway through, as long as it took less than X time of actual painting.  usually they're done in one sitting though).

I've included the 'Christmas Paints' I did in the first year in the lineup, since in retrospect they fall well within the window of what I now consider speedpaints, but I'm not including the facebook portraits I did a while back because of the fairly arbitrary reasoning that they're in a different folder on my hard drive.

I was tempted to include a couple of the unfinished ones (there are only about 6), just to bring the number up to 200, but I then decided I'd rather do something different for the 200th paint (You'll see it next month, unless you're here from facebook or DeviantArt, in which case you've already seen it).  Many of those unfinished 6 have already appeared on the blog in one capacity or another, and have usually been labeled as such.

The shortest took 5 minutes (or less!  I always round to the closest 5 minutes), the longest 190 (that's about 3hrs and 10 minutes, if your maths are as bad as mine), but that was an unusual case, and I mentioned it at the time.  Usually I try to keep them at under 2 hours, and usually feel increasingly guilty as the time gets close to that.  Sometimes I just get into painting though, and don't really notice the time passing until my butt gets sore, which generally seems to be at about the 1 hour and 45 minute mark.

The majority of the paintings were done in ArtRage, with the first use of something else (Photoshop) being in the third year.  Since then I've used it more and more (especially since I created a brush similar to the one I like in AR), but still regularly use ArtRage.  To date  26 Speedpaints have been in Photoshop, and 169 in ArtRage, with a mere 3 being in Sketchbook pro (I'm not a fan).

One of the images in the lineups is one I've never uploaded before (for reasons I won't go into, because they're boring), so its thumbnail here is the first time I've shown it - there will be no prize for picking it out of the lineup, but feel free if you want to challenge yourself.

Year One

One minor problem with the method I used to compile these images is that they aren't in any particular order other than the 12 month block they were created in.  I would have liked to sort by when they were done, but I also didn't want to spend the time doing it manually.  That's the case for all of these collective images, but this is as good a place to mention it as any.

So year one stretched from October 2010, through to May 2011, and in that time I did 50 paintings.  Some of them weren't terrible!  In fact the first I did (girl in a blue dress, second row down), is still one of my favourite pieces.  Oh, sure, I can do better now, but I'm not sure I can do better in half an hour!  Well, OK, maybe - I should make an effort to do some rougher speedier paints more often to find out.

Most of these took an hour or less, with only 3 going over that time (The Die Hard one and the girl in the pirate outfit on the first row, and the Two Ronnies, which is the first image on the second row).  There's an average of 1.72 paintings a week.  If I had decided to work out the years based on the October start date then the first year would have had 74 paintings, making it by far the most productive (even keeping up my current rate this next year is only going to end up with 48... maybe a handful more if I'm feeling particularly inspired).  But then, at the time I was doing less comission work (none in fact), and fewer 'bigger' pieces in general.

Year Two

More pictures, but less to talk about.  The pieces averaged out at one picture a week, which is actually better than I'm aiming for this year.  This is especially surprising to see given that the first image on this sheet was part of my "Stress doesn't help when speedpainting" post, so I think there was a fair chunk in there when I didn't paint anything.

There are two self portraits in this lot, both of which I'm still fairly happy with, and both of which I think I was coincidentally wearing the same T-shirt for.  There are also two pictures of my son, though you'd never know in at least one case, because it's an awful likeness.  Another awful likeness is that of George Clooney, three rows from the bottom.  Oh, you can't see George Clooney on that row?  Point made then.  Even now likenesses in portraits are extremely hit or miss for me to get.

Incidentally, the 100th speedpaint I did was the second portrait on the last line, though I didn't know that at the time, since I wasn't really counting back then.

Year Three

This year was by far my least productive, but also contains a lot of my favourite works.  In fact, from a quality vs quantity perspective this may have been the most fruitful year, as the ratio of ones I'm pleased with to those that I'm not might be higher than at any other time.

Not much else to say about this year, although it does contain the first Photoshop and Sketchbook Pro speedpaintings; The monotone portrait at the end of the second row down, and the parrot at the start of the next, respectively.

Year Four

Not much to say about this year either really - Productivity was up, while quality was... well, about the same, I guess.  fewer pieces I like compared to those I don't, but those I like I might like a little more?

This year also contained the longest speedpaint featured in this post - the blue haired girl in headphones - at a colossal 190 minutes.  I almost didn't count it as a speedpaint. I ended up doing so. since it was done with a speedpaint mentality at the time, and 3 hours and 10 minutes is still pretty quick by the standards I've held other pieces to.  That was also one of my most liked pieces by other people until recently - I'm still quite fond of it myself; I think the hair came out really well.

Year Five

This one brings us up to almost the current day (Since this image was compiled I've done another two paints, which I'll post about next month).  This last year has seen a sharp rise in the number of Photoshop paints, for no particular reason that I'm consciously aware of (maybe I'm just getting more comfortable using it for painting, or it could be because of the aforementioned ArtRage like brush, or maybe even that they finally overhauled their Color panel to be slightly useable).

If I had continued at the rate I began the year it would have been the slimmest yet, but a resolution has kept up a  steady flow since  January, with my forcing out a paint a week even when I've been otherwise busy, though as a result some of them are very rough and ready, like the Sumo Wrestler looking fellow on the 4th row down, or the final image in this set.

Those pieces are also examples of pieces I've not used reference for, or at least haven't used a direct reference for (three of the ten original pieces had plenty of reference, but it was referred to, not copied), which is something else I've done more of in the last year, though the quality is way behind those I've based more directly off photographs.

Lastly, this year also saw a huge increase in the number of environment pieces, rather than those based on people or animals (twice as many as the previous highest - 8 instead of 4).

And The Rest

These of course were not the only art related things I've done outside of work since the blog began, but they are the only ones I'm counting as speedpaints.  Apparently this means I've done a speedpaint every 1.2 weeks for the past 5 years (alright, 4 and a half years), which is actually a lot more than I would have thought, especially with the other pieces I've done in that time (I'm not going to calculate the averages there, at least not tonight.

So there we have it!  If this were one of those fancy popular blogs that people earn a living off these days I would say something like "Which was your favorite?  Leave a comment below and let us know!"  But since it's a perfectly ordinary blog, and I get a comment less often than I get a haircut, you can just make a vague decision in your head and keep it there if you'd like.  Oh, I neglected to mention it before, but you can click on those compiled images above to enlarge them.