January '13 and (December '12) Sketching

They say it never rains but it pours. I don't know who 'they' are, but they've been saying it for an awfully long time. Right now, with the rain streaming down the windows this seems a particularly apt term, as I do seem to have rather a lot to be getting on with after a month of relative artistic calm. Much of this comes from work, and so you may never see it dealt with here (though it's not out of the question eventually), but some of it I'll be dealing with here eventually. Eventually is an important word there, as I won't have much time to update the blog or do side work to show for a little while, so if this is the only post during February I hope you'll forgive me. But you're not here to hear me bemoan my work load, you're here to see art (come to the wrong place I suspect), so lets get on with it.

I did rather a lot of sketching in January. This may be the first time I've ever had to leave out "good" stuff because there was actually quite a bit of it. Usual fare here, although I really like the girl on the right, she turned out rather well. Here hair is actually based on hair I saw in a photograph, but I don't consider it from reference as I did the sketch sometime after seeing the photo, so I didn't refer to it directly.

The second set of Free sketching is more experimental than the first I guess. Quite happy with the Elfish girl with short hair, and the more cartoonish fellow to her upper right. The chap with the extra large nose didn't turn out as well as I'd have liked, but it's fine enough I guess. But anyway, this is more a sheet of characters than I might usually do.

The final free sketching of the month (and yes, mostly portraits this time), and I have to say I'm really pleased with these ones. I especially like baldy at the bottom there - the scan doesn't really do the shading on him justice because he really came out rather well (in my opinion).

I realised I'd been slacking off learning anatomy and such, and so during January I made an extra effort in that regard. This sheet is mostly my trying to visualize high level shapes and forms and how they fit together. I've done nothing really from a direct reference over the past 2 months, so this was a nice way to find my weaknesses so I can focus some reference drawing time on them this month (if I get any time anyway). Twisting and bending (and combinations thereof) seem to be especially weak, so that's a place to start when I next approach this sort of thing.

More of the same, but this one also features the focus I gave to the muscles of the upper torso. I still need to do some work on these, but I'm also going to move on and work on the musculature around the hips and upper legs soon. After that the back, the legs, arms (again) and so on. That lightcycle is based on a toy I own - technically that's from reference, but I didn't see the point of having a From Reference sheet with only one thing on it, and also the angle it's shown here was not the one I was looking at - it was an exercise in extrapolation.

And lastly, as always, the sketching disasters. Some of these don't look as bad as I remember them looking, but really it's a great sheet to look at in order to think "must do better". Top Right and Middle left were an attempt to try something a little more Picasso like. That didn't go so well.

And that's it. If I don't get time to post again this month I'll see you in March some time(really, circumstances beyond my control and all that - not that I'm really complaining). Next month is also the Blog's 3rd anniversary, so I'll try and put something together for that. Not like a cake or anything, but maybe a progress so far type affair.

A Welcome Return to Speed

It's been a crazy few weeks. I didn't mention this in my last couple of posts, but the company I work for filed for bankruptcy and put most of it's assets up for sale. I won't go into the details (You can look up THQ bankruptcy if you have an interest), but suffice to say it was a stressful time all round, and while I still have a job (under a different parent company, but still with the same team in the same place), many people didn't, and that makes me very unhappy.
And given all that stress art has not been at the forefront of my mind. Even so I've sketched more this month than at any time since September, and given how little I'd drawn in December I felt I may as well hold onto that for a post in early February.  Which leaves us with the few speedpaints I've managed to cobble together over the last two months.  My last speedpaint prior to this was also in September, and I have no interest in leaving it that long again as the quality level drops sharply if I don't do them for too long.

Time Taken: 35 Minutes
I've held off posting this for a while as I was trying to get the original photographers permission, but have had no response (my guess is they're busy).  So after some debating I've decided it doesn't look so much like the original photograph as to result in issues of copyright, and I'm just going to show it anyway.  It's based on one of hepiefull's wonderful wildlife photographs; you can find the original here.   The only really interesting thing about this image beyond that was that I did it in SketchBook Pro rather than Artrage.  I should do that more often - it prevents me from falling back on comfort methods while painting.

Time Taken: 40 Minutes
A few of my friends say this is one of their favourite speedpaints from me, but it really doesn't work much for me.  It's based on a photo from stockness, and looks pretty much nothing like her, and didn't achieve what I was aiming for in the first place (which was not a likeness but a fabric and pose study).  I like stockness apparently; I've drawn her before back in December 2011.  I suspect at some point I'll have to do a painting that specifically sets out to do her some kind of justice, rather than just mangling the poor girls features.  Oh, and this one is done in Photoshop, which I should really use more often.

Time Taken: 65 Minutes
I have no idea why this one took so long, and even less idea of how I mangled it as much as I did (The perspective on his face is all ganked up, much like the Riddick picture from the last speedpaint post).  Still, its got a colour pallete I can get behind, so that's something.  It's based on a photo from malenudereference at DeviantArt, but they seem to have closed their account so I can't link you to the original.  We're back to Artrage for this one, and for the rest.

Time Taken: 60 Minutes
It's a caricature of Neil Gaiman, and not a terribly good one.  He looks almost as much like Serverus Snape as he does Neil Gaiman.  Gaiman has an interesting face though, so I'm fairly sure I'll be revisiting his visage sooner or later. In the unlikely even he ever sees this blog: sorry Neil.  For all that though I like the more purple/red colour scheme of this one, and how it almost looks as though it actually is painted on canvas.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
I've had the picture this is based on saved to my hard drive for at least 10 years, and probably more.  I have long since forgotten why I saved it, or where it came from, and by today's standards it would probably be considered barely more than a thumbnail (it's 640x480).  I stumbled across it a few days ago and said "Ohh, that'll be good practice" and decided to speedpaint it.  Mostly I did it as practice for perspective, which I think we've already established I'm terrible at, but I also liked the less standard use of orange and blue in a picture (you see that combination all the time in film posters and stuff, but not generally like this).  The result still has some issues with the perspective, but it's a lot better than that Porsche I was trying to paint a while back.

And that's your lot.  I'm making a promise to myself to get back into the one-speedpaint-a-week mode ASAP (and by ASAP I mean as of now), and also to post some more video game things over the next few months - I've already covered RFA, but there's still SR, SR3, RFG and Punisher to cover.  That's assuming anyone wants to see things from those (Well, I'll do them anyway, you don't have to read them, right?).

Next post will probably be the bumper sketch post from December and this month - Next weekend with any luck.

After the Radio Times

I thought I'd already written this post. That's a weird way to start a post you have clearly yet to write, but I'm guessing it was a weird dream that led me to believe that it was the case. That or I'm a time traveler, which is a nice segway because this is another Doctor Who image. I thought it would be a fun and interesting thing to paint, thought it might be a little challenging, but it wasn't - it was very little fun and incredibly difficult to do. But we'll get there soon enough, or perhaps we already did...

So, shortly after showing the cover for TARDIS Eruditorum I was contacted by Wonderful Books, which produced a Doctor Who fanzine last year and is planning on repeating the idea this year.  Would I do a fan piece for the new publication?  Sure, why not?  So  they ask if I can do a piece based on the 1972 Radio Times Magazine Doctor Who special, but with the three modern Doctors, and that seemed pretty cool.  I sort of wanted to do a piece based on the front cover, but they want the interior two page spread (the photo is similar to, but not identical, to the one in the previous link).  Seems fine, I can do that.

The more I think about it though the more it appears I've bitten off more than I can chew. The spread needs to be A3 size, at print resolution; which is huge.  I need to upgrade my PC soon because there's no way my PC is going to be able to handle that all in one go, and I know a modern one could.  As it is I decide to paint the three doctors separately and then composite them into the same image at the end.  Not ideal, but doable.

The second problem is that there is a scarcity of photos of the new doctors with anything approaching the sort of lighting seen in the original.  I find a reasonable one of David Tennant lit similarly, but taken from a completely different angle.  I find another of Christopher Eccleston that has ideal lighting, but is taken from the wrong angle, and is all of 200 pixels high.  I can't find anything of Matt Smith lit this way.  Clearly I'm going to need to completely relight pictures of them from angles closer to those of the original 3 doctors poses.  This is not a small job.  I decide to start with Matt Smith, as he's going to be the most difficult given my lack of suitable lighting reference.

You may note that while the stance is the same this is not the same picture of Matt Smith that appears above.  You may also note that it's awful.  I'll address this in a moment.  So I had found a picture of smith standing just as I wanted him, but looking in entirely the wrong direction.  I found another image where he was looking int he right direction but standing differently.  I drew from both images to create my lineart, freehanding it, but taking some time over it rather than doing a quick sketch.  I then tried to relight what I had and paint Smith's face. for whatever reason this did not go well.  At one point I sent it to my wife for her opinion and she said "I Love You, but I think he looks like a 55 year old diabetic Matt Smith."  I fiddled about with it some more be eventually realised that she was right (except by this time it was looking more like 55 year old diabetic Matt Smith after a facelift), and gave him up as a bad job to be revisited later.  I left it for a few days in disgust before moving on to Chris Eccleston, which went much more smoothly.

This time I used a grid to help with his face - figuring that maybe part of the issue with the first attempt was down to me failing badly to capture Matt Smith's likeness in the line art (The jacket was sketched freehand again).  Unlike Matt Smith I did have some lighting reference, however poor, for Mr. Eccleston, so this one went much more easily.  In fact of the three Doctors I'm most pleased with how he turned out, and it went very smoothly indeed.  I didn't have any lighting reference for his jacket, so that was done blind, and I have to say it's the thing I'm most proud of in the piece as it came out looking pretty good.  Not much else to say, on to Tennant.

David Tennant went almost as smoothly as Ecclestone right up until I had to paint his suit.  His face isn't right though, as I couldn't quite capture the "vertical eyebrow raise" that he's quite well known for doing.  This may be because I was free handing it again, but whatever the reason he's recognisable even if he's not 100% accurate   When I got to the suit I had a heck of a time relighting it, but eventually found a reference where the lighting on his suit was pretty much exactly what I needed, and his pose was basically the same, so I lucked out there and just copied it; sadly the lighting in that shot didn't make it to his face.  I didn't spend much time on the lower left of his picture as I knew that was going to be obscured by the 9th Doctor, and I left out the shadow from that as I knew it would be much simpler to add it later.

Back to Matt Smith, and I finally found another suitable head pose for reference (still no lighting sadly).  The only problem was that it was backwards, so the floppy bit of his hair was behind his head instead of in front.  I flipped the image around, and  since I was fed up with drawing doctors at this point I scrapped the original painting all together and just traced the basic landmarks of his face onto the old body before adding in the details and corrected hair freehand.  I felt mildly guilty about this, but consoled myself with the fact that I was going to relight this portrait blind and that was more than complicated enough to justify a bit of laziness.  As you can see, this time the painting went a lot better and I could finally move on to his suit, which turned out to be the most difficult single thing I've ever done.

I could just not get this right, and no matter how much I tweaked and revised it it still looked sloppy.  I was quite please with the shadow falling across his shirt as it adds a little depth and believeability to the lighting, but other than that I'm not terrible happy with it.  I was going to add a herringbone pattern or tweed to the coat, but in the end I just got fed up and decided to leave it plain (which is something he has also worn in the series).

To the right you can see the progression of Matt Smith's eyes at actual size, if you were interested (like all the images in this post you can click to enlarge).  Mostly this is just to give an idea of the size of the picture rather than anything else.  It does give a reasonable view into how I was lighting it though, starting in fairly block surfaces and then gradually honing in on where the light would be falling across the surfaces of his face and where the shadows would fall.  The highlight on his left eye was adjusted until it felt right without overwhelming the rest of the lighting on that side of his face.  I don't know it the lighting is actually correct, but it's close enough if you don't break it down too much.

It's also worth noting at this point that in order to keep the Doctors thematically tied I used a similar colour pallet for all three (the exception being Tennant's coat in order that he stand out a little more given that he's at the back).  Ecclestone's jacket, Tennant's suit and Smith's coat all have a greenish hue (most noticeable in Ecclestone's leather), and each of them has a purple accent (T-Shirt, tie and suspenders, with the red of Smith's tie also leaning toward purple).  This latter may just be because I have Saint's Row on the brain because I later realised it was very similar to Saint's purple, though that wasn't my initial intention.

The background was painted separately and in a deliberately rough style to match the painted drop cloth of the original 1972 photograph.  I didn't go for a perfect replica, but it's in the same ballpark.  The purple used in the three doctors clothes again is hinted at here.  Finally I brought it into photoshop and airbrushed the lighting on, including some ripples in the drop cloth for the final composition (they're not show in this image as they were on a separate layer and I forgot to turn it on before saving this jpeg).  The last step was bringing the Doctors in one at a time and placing them in the image with enough space for text to be placed above Ecclestone's head and a good border for printing alignment purposes.

This was all supposed to have been done by the end of November, but in the end it was finished the first week of December (I think), which worked out okay since the fanzine was delayed to this month.  It should be out any time now - when it is released you'll be able to find it at Wonderful Books.   I'm looking forward to it myself; if nothing else I want to see what all the other artists produced, and what the various authors came up with.

Finally,here's a series scaled and modified to fit my desktop, in the unlikely event that you want them for your wallpaper:

Painting Class: Landscape

I finally finished the second painting I had begun during my painting class (which you can catch up on here if you've failed to read it thus far). It took longer than planned. This was because of the previously mentioned Doctor Who piece I was working on turning out to be rather more complicated than expected. That's finished too, and I'll be posting about it early in the new year.

Once that was done there was this little festive thing that came up called Christmas (you may have experienced this particular time-sink, fun though it is) as well as some curfuffle at work. That particular thing has yet to be resolved, but looks hopeful and should be sorted out by my birthday one way or another. If you have no idea where I work or what the issue is then I won't bore you with it, and if you do know then why would I tell you again?

Anyway, I finished the painting. I expect you'd like to see it?

To be fair, it does look moderately better in the flesh (as little as that says), but I've still yet to work out how to light pieces for good photography and I need a tripod.  I have got a swanky new camera though, so that's something.  It's based on this photograph by Chamberstock 

My wife wants to hang it somewhere.  I suggested face to the wall in the lavatory, but she's picked out pride of place in the living room instead.  I really am honestly baffled why people like my stuff most of the time, but I'm thankful for it too despite feeling awkward about the compliments; one day maybe it'll make me money when I'm too old to work on videogames because the technology confuses me, as DVR's do my grandparents.

Before I go on I need to say some things about the class, which I didn't last time as I was too busy wittering on about my cats (incidentally, Christmas Trees and cats - oh what a wonderful combination that isn't).

There were 11 of us in the class of wildly varying ages (I was not the youngest, nor the oldest, but toward the younger end of the spectrum) and predominantly X chromosomes (there were two guys in the group, one of whom was yours truly).  The styles were wildly varying, but I wouldn't say that anyone was really bad, just inexperienced - much like me.  Some of the art produced there was really wonderful, varying pieces putting me in mind of Hockney, Lowry and other artists who's work I know but names I don't.  Pretty good for a bunch of amateurs.  Good company to be in.

Our instructor was Paula McCartey (not to be confused with the Beatle, who is the wrong sex for starters), who kept quiet about her body of work until the end (not that it's hard to find these days) but turned out to be a very accomplished painter of some local renown (maybe more than local, I didn't go and ask around elsewhere).  Her daughter works in the same building as me it transpires, though I have yet to meet her that I know of.  Small town, big world.

I had to miss two weeks of the class unfortunately due to illness (mine and others) so I started the painting at home since I knew the subject was to be a landscape.  My wife printed up some photo sized landscape images of my choosing, and I went with the one that appealed most at the time.  The image above is me painting, obviously.

Naturally, being me I forgot to take a picture of it after the first stage of painting, so this is after the second.  You can see at the bottom that I'd started by just roughing in lines in blue on a lighter blue field.  I wanted some of that blue to show through the finished piece, I'm not sure it really did, but it made painting the sky easier.  After that I just started painting over the top.  I think I preferred this to using pencil (as I did with the rabbit) as it was less likely to muddy the paint that went over it.

I think this was the stage I had reached when I returned to the class.  Not much else to say about it, although it went down quite well with the other artists.  Oh, no, actually I'm remembering it wrong.  The water was painted before that class, but the cliffs weren't - this is at the end of that week's class.

And this is after the final class.  The color looks really good here - this may be as a result of the better lighting in the class' work area, or it might be because of the camera - this being taken by one of the other students (Thanks Suna!). I really don't know, but I'll take it.

I could have called it quits there I guess, but I really wanted it to feel a little more golden, and my brother sugested it looked like a hairy green woman lying down in a river , looking up from her feet. Once he'd said it I could see it as little else so I spent a final couple of hours on it after Christmas adding more fall colours and fog and detail before calling it finished.

and that's the end of my adventures in Painting Class.  Unless I do another, which I probably will at some point.  I need to come up with something to paint just for myself now though - not going to improve otherwise...

Sketching for November '12

And here is the second sketching post this month, which brings us all up to date on that until January. I still haven't got much juice back for additional sketching/speedpainting, though I have manage a little of both - most of it appalling. You still get to see it along the line though, because that's the entire point of the blog, yes? I'm also hoping to finish the painting I was working on at my painting class this week. That said I've meant to sit down and work on it for the past 3 days and haven't managed to, so we'll see if I can manage it.

Really though, I don't have a great deal to cover in this post, so I'll cut to the chase and get on with the images.

Free Sketching

Very little of real note here - mostly middle of the road stuff.  The woman in the top left (also the icon for this post) is somewhat disappointing since she looks good in my sketchbook, but terrible scanned (I think the sketch may have been a little light).  The rest very between good and almost terrible, though I'm really quite happy with the eye and the girls tu-tu.  On the left, under the woman, are two stylistic experiments - the man I just decided to draw quite narrow and quite liked the result, while the girl is clearly a ailed attempt at a more Manga look, but I think it's interesting enough to show.

Figure Practice

That the figures I'm predominantly showing here are female is mostly just a coincidence; I drew lots of guys too, but they were either so sketchy it wasn't worth scanning them or I'd done them too light to really make them out once I had scanned them.  None of them were particularly great anyway (though few of them were complete failures either).  Sketches of note here are the girl in the lower middle - this was a failed attempt at drawing a flat-chested woman - instead she looks like a woman with a guy-chest.  The woman in the lower right... I don't know what I was trying to draw - is she pregnant? bloated? infested with alien plague?  No idea, but it's an interesting visual nevertheless.

I still really need to get back to practicing hands and feet (and all the other anatomy in between).

From Reference

My Father-in-Law, Sister-in-Law and Chewbacca the dog (terrible likeness), along with "random dude in a restaurant," were the only things I really had to show after Thanksgiving (with one more in the failures below).  Not sure why, but it was particularly difficult to draw this year - fewer people moving around more or something, I don't know.  The other two sketches are based on Stock photographs from  PhotoStockMarket and im-stocking-you from DeviantArt.

Abject Failures

At first glance these may appear fairly respectable, but the person on the left looks like neither a guy nor a girl but somewhere creepily in between, the person in the middle was another experiment with style but turned out creepy instead of cool, and the right most sketch is of my Brother-in-Law but could not look less like him if I had tried.  So, while there are worse sketches in my sketchbook, these were definitely the most disappointing.  Yuck.

So, until the next time, have a Merry Christmas, or whichever seasonal alternative you celebrate   I'll probably not post until afterwards, but hopefully before the new year.

Sketching for October '12

I was going to do a mixed post for October and November's sketching, but then I forgot to scan November, so November will be a few days coming. I also had a post planned for the piece I've been working on over the last month, but the publishing got pushed back to January, so I'll write one then. I've finished that piece, and working on it, as well as some head expanding problems at work have left me little artistic mojo left over for much else. The piece is finished now though, so I can resume speedpainting guilt free. We'll see how many I can do between now and Christmas so I can cram another post into December to make up for the lost one.

Anyway, sketching. Didn't do much in October or November (as I've mentioned frequently), but there's enough for a quick post I think (albeit one with a mere three images). On we go then...

Free Sketching
So these were from October, as you may have gathered, that explains the presence of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster here. I quite like the Monster - he ended up cute rather than menacing, and I am A-OK with that (though I guess I need to practice menacing lighting and expressions now). Vinnie Van Gough to The Monster's left was just some practice with facial hair and not intended as a portrait of the famous 1.5 eared impressionist (I hear his Napoleon was uncanny). Yes, another girl with Elf/Vulcan ears on the left there. I like pointy ears, they're cute. There's apparently a big fuss as as you can have your ears pointed surgically these days, and "All the kids are doing it, under the influence of Spock and Arwen!" etc. Good for them, it's certainly more attractive than those giant earning implants that stretch your ear lobes out like silly string - and unfortunately that's a lot more prevalent. if you have those ear implants don't be too offended, that's dandy, I'm happy for your choice, but I don't have to find it aesthetically pleasing either. I should probably do a proper pointy eared painting soon and get it out of my system.

Figure Drawing Practice
Not much of any real note here. I clearly still need to work on hands a lot, and all that stuff I learned about arms recently has apparently already escaped me. I'll be working on more anatomical studies from reference over the next month or so, so hopefully things will improve a little. I am fairly please with the back on the guy to the right, and the girl to his left (except her witch hand and his stumpy legs), but there's clearly a long way to go here.

Failures
OK, so only 2 of these are out and out disasters, the others have some merits but are still failures over all. The upper half of the girl on the left is pretty good, and I quite like her head and hair, but the lower half. oops. The Bat-mobile looks OK in a retro kinda 60's way, but my son told me it was terrible. When a 5 year old thinks your Bat-mobile is terrible you may as well believe them, they know their Bat-mobiles.

And that's it for today, short but sweet (I have a headache coming on or I'd waffle more). More to follow, probably next weekend.  In the meantime, here's a pointless picture of the Lego space fighter I built for my son, a sort of mini "Daddy can you?"

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...