Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Speedpaints

Back once more with the monthly speedpaint roundup. A little different this month, but we'll get to that in a minute. I decided at the Blog's birthday to try doing at least one speedpaint a week for the year, and so far I've managed to keep to that; so I have another four for you to see.

In other related news I'm taking a break from doing the commissions for a little bit in order to focus on improvement. People still want them, and I'd like to do them, but I feel bad taking peoples hard earned when there's improvement to be had (plus, they're a lot of work), so on with that for a few weeks before the money raking (hah!) can continue.

I've also co-started a group at work dedicated to that very improvement. I'm very happy with the response so far as we have artist and non artist alike all wanting to improve. We're not doing lessons and such (so far), it's more like a Weight Watchers type setup where we all admit that we suck and give each other support to improve. Expect to see some of my results appearing in the blog in future - right now I'm drawing a page of circles every night for two weeks, I'm sure you can hardly wait to gaze upon those those now can you?

OK, enough preamble...

Time Taken: 1 hour

My friend took a photo of these peaks in the Gower (look it up) with her phone and then posted it to friendface. Naturally I jumped on it immediately and, with her permission, painted it. It's not an exact copy, but it's close enough, and it's been a while since I've painted anything landscape like. If I'd spent about another hour on it it could have looked really good I think (not planning to though).

Time Taken: 35 Minutes

San Diego Comic Con was this month, and appearing on the floor were the three trolls from The Hobbit which many people took photos of. I thought that might be fun to paint, so I had a go at it. For the fun of experimentation I used very thick paint (fake, in ArtRage, obviously) and a low load. The result isn't that great as just as I was getting into it something came up and I had to leave it and then I didn't get back to it in a timely manner. But I also grabbed this:

I realized that I could "rewind" the painting by using undo because ArtRage seems to have an infinite number of undo steps per session. I took the chance to do what I've rarely done before and grabbed some work in progress shots of a speedpaint. It's odd that these were saved after the fact, but nevertheless they give a little insight into my speedpainting process (Which I think varies a bit every time). I did this for the other paints this month too.

Time Taken: 45 Minutes

I guess I've had this flagged for painting for ages. It's based on Stock by the intriguingly named pretentioustwat on Deviantart. I was originally going to paint the whole thing, but after viewing it full size (which naturally didn't fit on the screen) I thought just this crop of it might work too. I also decided (experimenting again) to make dark blue the darkest it could go, rather than black. I quite like the result.

Which is not to say its as good as I would have liked. I messed up her hands something fierce, but I suppose it's good enough. 15 Minutes in I almost gave up on it as obviously no good could come of it, but I'm glad I kept on. Interestingly it was only when it was finished that I could take a step back and decide the lack of black (or at least near black) had worked. Until then I was convinced it would be far too obvious, but in the end result I don't think it is until you really take a good look at it.

Time Taken: 35 Minutes

This is by far my favorite paint of the month. It's far from perfect, but it has that loose look I really liked about the portrait of the man from the last speedpaint post, but with a more finished feel. It's loosely based on this photo, though I have no idea where that picture originates from unfortunately.

As an experiment I saved the undo series as a video and uploaded it. You don't get to see the actual settings used or the occasional mistakes I made (since they were undone during the process and therefor not recorded), but it's a lot less stressful than doing it real time (as I've done before).

And so there we have it for another month. I don't think I'll be posting progress pictures for speedpaints ever month, but if you think I should feel free to let me know. I'll may post them for paints I really like though, as that's possibly worth the effort.

The Best and Worst Sketching of May and June

This one's rather late in coming, and for that I apologize (you're used to it by now I'm sure).

Since I last posted I've had another virus infect my machine, I've upgraded windows and re-installed twice (partly due to the virus), gone deaf in one ear due to allergies (which cleared up - but now it's happened to the other ear) and discovered my scanner no longer works (Windows 7 incompatible, there's nothing actually wrong with the scanner itself). There was probably some other stuff in there too, but if I don't remember it it's probably not important.

Thankfully I had the good sense to scan sketches before that first re-install, so I do in fact have something to show today.

 Figure and Perspective Practice

I really need to work on my anatomy properly soon (and I'm taking steps to make that more likely to happen - but more on that some other time). It's improving, and I have a general idea of it, but I regularly forget some of it when I most need to remember (mostly on arms) and other parts I have very little knowledge of at all (legs). Still, some of this turned out okay.

I particularly like how the girl in the lower middle turned out, as well as the guy in the upper right corner. Other than that, fairly average stuff.

Free Sketching

Lots of free sketching this time around - much more than I would have expected, but I guess if you post two months worth at once that's what you get.

Not much to comment on except that I think the sketches in #1 are far better than in #2. And yes, that is a chainsaw; it's a prelim for a work I'll probably never get around to painting (but there again, I might.

Focus Sketching

I didn't really have a focus during these two months, but I did draw more hands than usual. Many of them are attached to people and can be seen in the other images, but this is a small selection of free floating ones. Still bad, but improving.

Work From Reference

Not a great deal given the time period. I need to set some time aside to do this more often - they're rarely very large and don't tend to take long when they're at this level.

Anyway, I had a link to the image the first one is based on, but it got nuked by the virus. If I find it again I'll add the link here. The guy with the hair is based on this image by Random Acts

I don't recall where the other two came from, just random images on the web I think.

Oh Dear

And as usual I'm finishing on a low note with some of the worst (as in, most disappointing) sketching of the time period. I really don't have much to say about these - they sort of speak for themselves (admittedly spattering you with phlegm as they do so).

Anyway, hopefully less of a delay before the next post. I have some speedpaints lined up to show, and a new scanner is winging it's way across the country to me so I can scan this months sketches for next months post. Whoopie.

Children of the Apocalypse

Despite the title of this post it should be noted that the two boys in the picture that follow are actually lovely lads.  The reason for the title is something that's not even apparent in the images, yet it's been the planned title ever since I got the commission for it back in April.

So why was it always the planned title?  Because the original brief required the two boys to be standing in front of a nuclear explosion with an innocent look on their face.  The idea was that they unintentionally bring chaos and destruction with them wherever they go.  They're boys, this is standard operating procedure :)

Okay, let's get to the chase and we can review afterwards.

Click to zoom, and so on....  Note the lack of an apocalyptic backdrop.

So I was at work one day and my colleague 'Z' comes by my desk.  I like Z, he's a good guy, with a laugh that's in the top three most awesome I've ever heard (and by far the loudest).  Despite this we work in very different areas, so for him to come by my desk is a rarity.  He cut straight to the chase, which is nice.

"Do you do commissions?"

"Not generally, but I could I guess" (This was before I got two others)

And so I got my first paying gig as a 'painter'.  Cool. I explained that I could only do digital (I can do real media of course, but I wouldn't charge for the resulting rubbish as yet), and I'd let him know the price as soon as I'd thought about it.  Then he laid out the whole "Kids in front of an explosion" theme.  How could I resist that?

We settled on a price (which he felt was too little, but I didn't want to charge more without being able to guarantee an awesome result), and set a date for me to come over for a photoshoot.  This makes it sound far grander than it actually was, given the rundown Cannon point and shoot I would be using, but I felt it important to get reasonable quality images and to meet the subjects.

Well, the date fell through, then it fell through again, and again.  On the fourth attempt I finally managed to get together with them for the photos.  Sadly after a run of lovely weather (the sunny look of which would be perfect for the atomic theme) it was dismal that day.   Never mind, I can still take photos.

Then it turned out that Z had either forgotten to mention the big boom to his wife, or it had been forgotten in the huge gap between the concept and my moving on it.  There was some discussion, but no decision - so I hedged my bets and got photos suitable for both likely scenarios.  I took more supporting innocent expressions and "It's his fault" poses than brotherly love, which turned out to be a mistake when the final decision went that way after all.  So between that and my terrible skills as a photographer these were the two usable photographs I had to work from:

I preferred the closeness in the right hand one, but the eldest's (R's) eyes are closed and I felt the hand in pocket pose of the one on the left better captured his personality.  I decided to merge the two, extrapolate R's eyes and move his arm from the youngest's (L's) shoulders to around his waist  to make it seem cosier (which would also hide the cast he was wearing).  Time to get sketching.

So I should make it clear that I didn't just magically sketch the initial lineart with extreme accuracy.  Since I wanted to get this right I used a grid to get the rough proportions down, as well as the locations of the features, then I drew over the top of my rough layout; you can see the line running down R's face - I put that one on the wrong layer.  I won't bother showing you the layout one as it's all stuff like that - seemingly random lines floating in space, and that's boring (mind you, if you're still reading maybe boredom isn't an issue).

After that I painted a rough colour layout and flattened the whole thing down.  You'll observe the background is chaotic orange - this is because in my head it's still an explosion, and I found it hard to let go of the initial vision I'd had for the piece.

I threw another layer on top and started painting R's face.  I should point out that with the exception of a mask layer you'll see later on these were the only two layers I used.  I got around the ArtRage issue I've had in the past with opposing colours by changing the way the paint mixing works in the preferences.  I didn't even know I could do that until I painted the zombie piece last month.  So, in the last image above I've taken R's face to a rough first pass and started on L's.  I'm not happy with R's eye and L looks a bit like the Joker. Clearly a long way to go then.

Not all that much to cover here.  The first two show the completion of the first pass on their faces and my starting their t-shirts.  T-shirts are boring to talk about, although you'll note they're blue rather than the red in the photo  (I forgot to mention this before).  This had some repercussions as the red of their shirts is reflected on their skin in the photos, so I had to substitute for blue instead, which makes a surprisingly big difference.  I also decided to lose the stripes on L's shirt at this point, better to unify them, and also because of a concern that the lines would pull the attention away from their faces (one of the reasons I switched from Red to blue in the first place - red is more eye catching).

In the lower left image you can see I've started to paint the background in solid orange.  This isn't actually part of the painting but is on it's own layer as the basis of a mask later on - I left it orange so it wasn't  too distracting while painting.  At around this point I got some feedback letting me know that it was felt R's nose was a bit pointy, so I took that as an indicator I needed to rework his face some.  I fixed his nose and his eyes and changed the shape of his face a little and did some blending, which I've also started on L's face in the lower right image.

Onto the final stretch.

Initially I gave into stupidity instead of taking my eye's word for things and painted R's hair dark brown, because it is.  Afterward though it looked all wrong, so I took a step back and reviewed the photograph, noting that the light made it almost appear light grey, so I repainted it.  I don't have an image of the brown for you as it's not worth spending your time on (and I spent quite enough of mine on it), so here you see the repaint. with the result (and the start of L's hair) on the top left, along with my completion of the mask.

For the final background I painted over the orange chaos using the mask to protect the image of the boys - I've let the initial background show through a little for texture  as well as adding a little mottling into it.  You'll notice in the gif below that it started out more yellow - but that just wasn't working out for me (and I felt the result looked to much like a previous commission) so I switched it to brown. You may not notice much of a difference between the lower left and lower right images, but other than signing it I've also done some cleanup of their hairlines, finished R's jeans, tweaked the hands, and added a little "chaos" to the bottom of the image for visual interest.

And there you have it.  Those familiar with the blog know it's pretty rare that I blow my own trumpet, and rather than change that I'll late Z speak for me, from his facebook posts regarding the image:

"So this is what happens when you ask a fantastic artist to do a portrait of your sons. I am so happy right now.

Stuff like this never ceases to amaze me. I couldn't do accurate stick figures of my boys and I've known them, well, their entire life. James not only got their look but their personality. HOW?"

Well, now you know the how ;)

(You might need to right click this image ans reload it to see the animation... then again, you might not)

Experimenting at Speed

I've had my system in it's current configuration for a little over two years - Slightly before my starting the blog in fact. In that time I have not had a single virus on my machine until the one I caught during the Grave Yard Haunt commission. I've now got another one. Annoyed does not quite cover it.

I've spent a good chunk of the day removing it from my system, but there seems to be some residual junk left (or I have a third unidentified one on here) as my system is now running like crud. And yes, I'm running a virus checker - in fact I've got three running as I type. It's taken me half an hour to get this far into the post as things keep locking up, so let's see if I can actually get this post published before midnight eh? You'll forgive me if I keep things brief.

The focus this month has been on experimenting with techniques different to those I usually employ - all of them are done using the oil brush and/or palette knife, but with very different settings; all in ArtRage as usual.

Time Taken: 60 Minutes

This one uses fairly thick wet paint with a low load and square brush and a lot of loaded palette knife. It's based on this lovely image by Magickstock on deviantart.

Time Taken: 35 Minutes

In this one I'm using a similar amount of thinner to my usual stuff, but with a round brush (I tend toward rectangular) and wet paint.

Time Taken: 25 Minutes

Thin wet paint with a square brush. This one did not go well, but that's only half due to the settings I was using - the other half is because I'm inept.

Time Taken: 20 Minutes

I love this one - it's my favourite speed paint for a while. Thick wet paint with a round brush, and then painted over with thinned dry paint on a square brush. I really like the result.

Time Taken: 60 Minutes

You just get the censored version of this one (I'm erring on the side of caution with the blog and facebook). It's based on this image by chamberstock - though you may need to be a member of deviantart to see it due to nudity.

That's all for today - sorry for the brevity. I did have a couple of stages of two of these images that may have been of interest, but I'll either have to come back when the system is clean, leave it for a future post, or just not show them on the blog. I do have another post (for the latest commission) all ready to go, but I really need to scrub my system clean before I can write it. Should be in the next few days. Oh, and I'm rolling the sketches of May and June into the same post since there was so little sketching in June. Okay, I'm done, off to nuke my system from orbit (It's the only way to be sure). Get outta here while you still can :)

Grave Yard Haunt

There is a saying, allegedly of Chinese origin, that goes "May you live in interesting times." It's thought to be a curse rather than a blessing. I've had an interesting month.
Nobody has died (yet), or ended up in hospital (well, once, briefly), or lost their job (That I know personally), or have gotten a divorce (thus far) but a great many things have occurred to lower my priority on updating the blog. I can't go into all of them, so I won't go into any of them, but this is the reason I've not updated the blog so far this month, and why I've barely sketched at all recently.
That said, I have painted a second commission and I'm working on a third - This entry covers the second. It's not a particularly mature subject, but you should be warned that zombies walk below.

And there they are, walking. Why are they walking? Well, they're zombies, that's what they do. Not for nothing is the comic turned TV show called The Walking Dead. But looks can be deceiving, for these zombies just look like they're walking, when in fact they're standing very very still.

"Can you do me a painting?" I was asked by a friend at work (We'll call him "Moby"). "Depends," I replied "I'm already scheduled for one piece by the end of the month, so I can't do anything complicated."

It turned out that he wanted a painting of some zombies for his wife's birthday, "in the style of a horror comic cover." You may find this somewhat strange, but you're not familiar with Moby and his wife. They live for Halloween. Each year, starting in August, they begin construction of a "Yard Haunt" for All Hallows Eve. Over the years this has grown into quite a display, with witches cackling over cauldrons, transforming werewolves, giant spiders, custom made gravestones for fictional characters and a red lit vampire overseeing it all; but the center piece is the zombies - lots of them.

A couple of years ago I based this speed paint on the vampire in their display, and Moby's better half was so taken with it I was asked if they could print a copy, which I believe is now hanging in their hallway, so naturally as a dutiful husband Moby felt that if she liked that she'd like a more polished piece even more. Enter me.

There was a catch though - it had to be finished by noon on her birthday in order for him to get it printed and framed (yes, this is another digital piece - I'll get around to real paint again eventually), and it needed to be poster sized. So, a tight time limit (12 Days) and a hefty resolution (The biggest I've done). No problem! How hard can it be?

The next day I had these rough sketches and a contract. Signed and paid (up front, no pressure then), "something like the second one" selected and a handful of reference photos handed over I went home and got started.

Firstly I had a small problem. The photos were generally of a good quality, with lots of shots of the three zombies I was to paint, but none of them were from terribly useful angles, and every one had different lighting to the others. I don't think there was a clear shot of their feet either. Tricky... Need a solution. I could draw the figures, but that's a little hit or miss for something that needed to be complete in 11 days, so I turned to a package called "Daz 3D" that allows you to pose figures in 3D. It's designed to do all sorts of fancy things, but for the purposes of this exercise we can think of it as a high-tech version of those wooden artist dummies (which always seem to be crap, by the way).

Here's the resulting render; Originally I was planning on lighting it like this, but gave up on that idea fairly quickly. You'll note I've also mocked up a basic graveyard, but for time reasons I ended up only completing the front two gravestones. The poses are based on the actual poses of the Yard Haunt zombies so as to be as authentic as possible. The heads would eventually be based directly on the photographs I had with the lighting tweaked to better fit the scene.

I kept each major element on it's own layer to save time, although that actually didn't work out as well as I'd hoped since the image was so big my PC choked on it and slowed down a lot. Still, it did allow for easier tweaks as I went along. Here you can see the development of the layout and the color scheme as well as the first pass on the the zombies. I had no idea what I wanted in the background at this point, other than "Trees", so that's a bit rough. These four images show the first bit of digital "trickery" as well - I resized the female zombie after first painting her so she didn't seem to loom over the one in front (the second time was resizing the lead zombies head later on, though I regret that in retrospect).

It was around the time of the first of these four images that my PC caught a virus and I managed to lose two hours of actual work as a result, plus about 8 hours of painting time while I cleared it off my system. Nasty business, and the lost time was primary in my deciding to simplify the image by losing the background graves and not including the comic title as I'd originally planned.

My compromise was to make the mist a lot thicker than originally intended, and to have the trees and clouds form a skull in the background. This latter was inspired by the Mondo Return of the Jedi Poster, which is extremely cool. I didn't look up their poster until I'd completed this, but I had a recollection of it from the first time I saw it last year.

The sky and the fog posed a minor problem, and I cheated a bit by painting them half size for speed's sake and then bringing them into the final picture and painting over the top for the final result. The gravestones are based on actual ones they use in their yard display, which I thought was a nice touch, though you can barely see the one on the right of the image.

Finally, here's a more detailed look at the painting of the female zombie (they name them, but I forget the names). I can probably do better than this, but not while rushing at the same time as capturing a 50's horror comic vibe. I was concerned that my compromises would not meet with Moby's approval, but I figure that based on the time I spent on it he'd probably got his money's worth regardless. I just hoped that the birthday girl would like it.

She did, thankfully. Liked it enough that I got invited to her birthday dinner where she and her family enthused about it at length. That was nice, and appreciated, although being a humble soul I found the whole thing a little awkward (I don't do that well with compliments, don't quite know how to take them, though they're always nice to have).

So yeah, I've not seen the final print as yet, but I'm told it looks pretty great and is really big and cast a shadow over all her other presents that day, so that's great. For myself I'm not completely happy - if I were to do it again I would change the composition slightly, moving the female zombie to the front (I think her light shade draws the eye more than the guy in brown), but given the time constraints and the reception I guess I should be quite pleased with myself. I know one thing, it was certainly an interesting experience ;)

A Balance of Speed and Quality

I'm somewhat amazed to find it's been almost two months since I last did a Speedpaint update. Unfortunately I don't have that many good pieces to show, but I do have a lot of awful ones. You see, I don't post every speedpaint I do. Oh, I post the bad ones - there's plenty of evidence to that fact, but I also start a lot of speedpaints that I realise are dreadful early on and then don't bother to finish, or that get interrupted and I don't get back to, or I just realize I'm not feeling it and stop. Usually I'll post them anyway, but a handful have slipped through the net. Today I'll gather them up and post them to get them out of the way - an admission that I probably won't get back to them so I can move along with a clean conscience that I've been true to the mandate of the blog. To make up for the horror to follow you can see a couple of nicer ones though, bringing the speedpaints up to date.
The Good
These are recent one's I'm relatively pleased with:

Time Taken: 25 Minutes
Just a quick sketch with no reference. Quite like the tone of it, although the brushwork could do with some refinement.

Time Taken: 1 hour
This is actually part of a much bigger stock photo by jademacalla on Deviantart. Jade does lots of seriously awesome stock photography - generally himself (I'm guessing it's him) dressed and posing like an action hero. He's good at it - almost always looking badass rather than a scrawny Bruce Willis wannabe. Anyway, this one was a nice quiet one, which I liked, but got caught up in painting just his head - That's fine, it leaves the door open for a more finished piece, and I learned a surprising amount, so it's all good.

Time Taken: 40 Minutes
Another reference-less piece, this time in colour of course. Not much to say about it really, it has some issues but isn't dreadful. The hair turned out quite nicely.

Time Taken: 2 Hours
A little long for real classification as a SpeedPaint (by my own definition anyway), but I don't have an issue with stretching the rules from time to time. This one is unusual for more than just the time spent on it, it's also the first ArtRage piece I've done with just (or even primarily) the airbrush tool, and it's one of the rare pieces I've done smaller than the native res of the screen. The preview isn't much smaller than the final image. If you don't know what this is a picture of then you've never seen Robocop clearly. This is ED-209, the precursor of the titular cop (sort of). My Brother suggested I paint it when I was fishing for ideas; I think it turned out pretty well.


The Bad
Best not to talk about these all that much, just show with a quick comment.

Time taken: 55 Minutes
There are elements of this I like, but when compared to how the picture should look (in my head you understand, this is not from reference, which is probably part of the issue) it's dreadful.

Time Taken: 15 Minutes
This could have gone some interesting places if I'd given it more time, but my body decided it was time for bed at this point, and who was I to argue. I might reuse the colour scheme or subject some time, but probably not together.


The Ugly
Really, I'm not saying anything about these at all (other than how long I wasted on them). They're not complete, not even approaching a presentable state - you get to see them anyway (very little click to zoom here - what you see when you click is barely more than is shown here).

Time Wasted: 45 Minutes

Time Wasted: 20 Minutes

Time Wasted: 40 Minutes (yes, really)

One Little Pony

No, I failed utterly to make a post about the Blog's birthday. I would say I'm rubbish (but you already know that), but instead I'll point to the slightly hectic couple of weeks I've had with dental work and surprise birthday parties and Mother's Day (which we did bugger all for, as usual), and my Son's best friends planned move to Canada (and his sister's utter terror of my very presence)and my wife's car breaking down, and her entrance exam things for College in the Autumn, and so on and so on... What do you mean that sounds like an average week in your household? You need to lay off the caffeine dearies.

Anyway, so I got a bit swamped, but I also got a commission. Have I mentioned this before? No, I have not, if I mentioned anything it was an entirely different commission that I've not started yet (I need to schedule a photo session).

Now I think anyone who commissions me has got to be a bit bonkers, but lucky for me I know a lot of people who are ever so slightly off their rockers. After the last commission I sort of decided that I wouldn't do any more for a while (because it was hard), and so of course I've taken on another two (because I am thick, or at least a soft touch). So, I present to you the first commission I've ever done for which I will get paid (actual job work not withstanding).

And there we go. OK, until the next time!





You didn't really think you'd get off so easily did you? Of course not! on with the pointlessly detailed breakdown of my ineptitude.  As usual you can click the images for larger ones.

I needed to use the fax machine, and despite once having been a technician and my current job involving heinously complex computer things I am utterly useless at using the 131 year old technology (yes, really, although they didn't take off until Xerox made them in the 60's - the more you know...).

So our receptionist gave me a helping hand with it in order to get me out of her face since the Fax machine is right by her desk. When we were getting done she asked if I would do her a portrait as she needed cheering up (I thought she was asking the wrong artist if she wanted cheering up, but since I work with about 100 of them they're not in short supply, so I must be doing something right).

Naturally I said "Yes, if you pay me a THOUSAND DOLLARS! Muahahahah!" And then I told her the real price, and she said sure. I won't mention the sum, but as it turned out I spent longer on it than had planned, so she got a bargain (she helped me with that fax though, so I guess we're even :)). It was significantly less than a thousand dollars.

I got her to sign a contract on the Friday. I know, what a bast right? I have read that the hardest things to get used to doing is to charge friends money and get them to sign contracts, but if you're to work as an artist without going bonkers then it must be done. It's a horrible experience. If you've ever grabbed a warm water pipe in one hand and a cold one in the other you'll know it's a decidedly peculiar experience (If you haven't then just visualise peeing in your pants). Imagine that, but in your brain, yuk. So, with the contract signed I told her I'd get something to her in two weeks, and then I got it finished by Tuesday, having started it that very evensong (I don't actually pray, I just like the word evensong).

Pretty early into it and I'm actually pretty pleased with the likeness. It's not on the money, but it's pretty close. I almost wish I'd just tightened this up a bit because I like how I painted her eyes and mouth here, and I kinda love how her hair just sort of bleeds into the background. Incidentally, I nabbed the reference picture from her Friendface account (with her permission of course) but in the reference picture she was resting her hand on her cheek and wearing glasses. I had to do a fair bit of filling in the blanks on this one. This was close to the time I sent her an in progress shot, but it turned out she'd gone away for a few days so I didn't get any feedback until it was almost done - ah well, I was on a roll and I wasn't going to wait for her to come back.

Here I've added in her top and a bit of cleavage (it was in the photo, but I swear this is not why I chose it). I actually look some visual measurements here (I really need to write a post about that, I've mentioned it before to do with tracing). Up to this point I'd just been going by eye, but I finally held up my stylus (that's a fancy word for a digital pen BTW) in that classic artists pose with the arm extended and one eye all squinty. I discovered that I'd made her chest to small. I know, this doesn't seem possible, but it actually happened. I only mention this so you don't think I'm just making things bigger all willy nilly when you see the animated image down below, I really had just misjudged and corrected. I've also made a start on her right eye, and other than some minor tweaking it pretty much remains like this for the rest of the painting.

Jumping from that last step to this one makes it look easy, but I actually spend ages on her left eye. First I messed it up so it didn't look like her any more, then I got it right but made it to small, and then finally I got to this point, which I decided was pretty close (I still prefer the rough one I did right at the start though). I've also cleaned up her nose and the shadows on the left side of her face (that's her left, not yours).

Cleaned up the right side of her face, started detailing her shirt (the bit where the creases stop at the bottom is where her arm was obscuring the picture, so I had to guess the rest), boosted the colour a bit and OH MY GOSH! Where'd that hand come from? OK, I just felt it needed a little something there, and a hand was a logical choice. It's not her hand - it's a hand from an entirely different photograph that was all small and blurry and lit from the opposite direction - I feel I actually did a reasonable job of relighting and detailing it. Except the Thumb, which I change later.

Almost done. Really started on her hair, detailed the rest of her top and left arm, tweaked the thumb. Still not happy with it. Oh, and painted her mouth and added a hint of freckles too.

Lots of general fixes, fixed her thumb and I was ready to call it done. I wanted something else though - something else to make it more about her. She had a perfectly good hand doing nothing there, she could be holding a necklace or something (possibly a small effigy of me in a noose, I mean she might hate it). Then I realised that she loved horse riding. Horse on a chain it is then. I decided on a silver chain because I'm not a big fan of gold and it would just disappear into the background. Not having any silver chains handy at the time I just winged it. I don't think I did a great job, but it's fairly obvious what it's supposed to be, and I wanted to go to bed. The horse isn't in this picture, but it is in the final one at the top.

Here's a step by step GIF of the process(happy birthday animated GIF by the way):

And finally a recolored version I came up with diddling about with Photoshop afterwards. I sort of like it, it has a bit more drama.

So there we go, another post another portrait. I may get another post up over the weekend if all goes according to plan, but no promises - they're far to easy to break when it comes to blogging. Until then... go read another blog?