A Musing 6B: Trace Elements

You may recall, or more likely you may not, that in my last A Musing post I said I'd break down the various ways of transferring something from your mind onto a piece of paper (or screen, or piece of shale or whatever).  I said I would do it soon, and that was in April, which may cause you to wonder about my definition of "soon," but regardless, I'm doing it now, finally.

Assuming you didn't click on the link above and read the post (and you'll know if you did that I don't believe that you did for one second, so, sorry about that), you may need a refresher regarding what I think those methods were, so I'll list them below.  For now, all you really need to know is that we're covering the first one here.  It's tracing, just in case you skipped reading the post title as well as the linked post above.

So here's the list:

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

I'm sure some of you are thinking "What about Abstracts?  What do they fall under?"  Well, I'm not sure that they always come from premeditation (which the list above is referring to).  Those that are planned would likely fall under knowing, and those that aren't would fall under Guessing, or Random, or Going by Gut or something.  That's not to put abstracts down - some of them look amazing, but it is to say that I don't do abstracts, so I can't know how they are arrived at. It's outside the coverage of the list anyway.  I mention it because someone brought it up after reading the last post.  Irrelevant to this one, but I had to cover it somewhere.  OK, done with that, let's talk Tracing.

Paintings by Bernie Fuchs, Canaletto, Drew Struzan, Thomas Eakins, John Constable, Johan Vermeer,  Norman Rockwell, and an illustration by Leonardo DaVinci - You can click the image for a better look.

You probably know most of these paintings, might even know their names, or who painted them.  Which do you think were traced, and which not?

Did you go through and guess?  Do I need to set up a Survey Monkey account to find out?  OK, good.  So the answer is all of them.  Well, sometimes.  Well, maybe.  Better to say all of the artists are suspected of, or have admitted to tracing, and it's highly likely that if they did at all they did some here (except DaVinci because any likely pieces from him have been lost).

You don't believe me.  Of course you don't believe me!  These are works by some of the most respected and well known artists alive or dead, surely you don't get to be respected if you trace!  But you do, and they are. Well, probably. 

Lets break it down a little.  

Fuchs, Rockwell, Struzan and Constable all admit to tracing, at least sometimes. (1)

Eakins, Canaletto and Vermeer are thought to have traced, but there is little hard evidence, and the claims as to how much they traced (if at all) are contested. (2)

There is no evidence that Da Vinci traced, but he did invent the technique used by Constable, and it is suspected he used it for some of his landscape studies even if not for work on his final paintings. He also suggested advantages to the use of the Camera Obscura by artists, but there is no real evidence that he used it himself. (3)

Other artists, such as Jan Van eyck and Lorenzo Lotto have also been suspected of tracing (the strongest proponents being artist David Hockney and physicist Charles M. Falco), but the strong consensus is now that they did not (or at least not by using the methods proposed by Hockney and Falco).

So where does that leave us?  All the artists here from the dawn of the photograph are fairly open about tracing, though Rockwell felt guilty for it.  He also says that he had to, because everyone was doing it and he needed to keep up, so that likely tells you something important. 

Commercial Art

In commercial art, tracing is not a rarity, but the only way to tell conclusively that someone traces is if they admit it, or are caught doing it, because some artists are just that good that they have no need to - and obviously there are also those whose style is so far removed from naturalism that tracing would be worthless - Quentin Blake clearly never traces anything..  

So it's not a rarity, but it's not like everyone's in on the big tracing arty-party either.

I know of many concept artists who create photo montages and then paint over the top, and I would consider that to be tracing too.   They don't necessarily declare it from the rooftops, but they don't deny either, and some leave their photomontage sticking out from the rest of the paint.  There is no shame in it, the ideas are as important as the finished result in their line of work - and none of it has anything to do with how it was arrived at.

And that, really, is the important thing - In a commercial setting it doesn't matter how the end result is arrived at, as long as no plagiarism is occurring, only that it is.

It should be noted that the majority of these artists can (or could) produce exceptional work without resorting to tracing, but tracing is a shortcut, and when you're up against the clock a shortcut will gain you a lot.

Let's look at it this way, when most people make spaghetti they buy the sauce from the store (at least here they do), and they buy any meat pre minced.  is that cheating? Or is the important thing that you got a delicious meal and it took you less than 40 minutes to make it?  Oh, a purist would say it is, but sod them, you've eaten and started watching Game of Thrones before they've managed to prep the tomatoes.

Now if someone asks for the recipe, hopefully you're going to be honest and tell them it's Ragu, because doing otherwise is being deceptive, and that's not going to get you any friends if they find out the truth behind your world class Spag Bol.

The end results are what matter - the process is really just of interest to other tradesmen, or should be.  Yes, there's talk, often, that tracing limits your artistic growth, is somehow deceitful (only when you deny doing it kids), results in identical looking work, makes you less of an artistic visionary, and so on.  Maybe true, maybe not - Probably true if that's all you do.

But look at the artwork on display above (and yeah, I'm breaking a personal rule on this one and posting other peoples art on my Blog - sometimes you need to).  Each of those works has a different and distinctive look - each is of the artist's own style, as unique to each other as snowflakes in a field.  Even if tracing I doubt I could produce a work as compelling as that by the worst of them, and most certainly not if I was painting traditionally rather than digitally.  Traced or not, these are works of visionaries, the end results of which capture the eye and the imagination in and of themselves.

Consider this, you see a Magician performing his routine.  You know he's not doing actual magic, he's using visual deception and slight of hand.  You marvel at the result - the signed card is contained within the artichoke, the assistant rests in two halves, legs kicking, eyes smiling, the freaking Statue of Liberty is missing!  You know it's a trick, you know, basically, how it's done, but you don't know the specifics and even if you did you probably couldn't do it yourself, because manipulating the cards, the hat, the blades and even the audience, takes skill, and it takes practice.

Art is like that - to do it well takes years to master, and if, once you're far enough along, you resort to shortcuts to get the piece done on time, what of it?

Fine Art

But that's professionals working to a commision.  What of fine artists doing it for the love of it, maybe making money as the end result, but maybe just a hobbiest? Well, at that point, again, who cares?  Maybe someone hates doing the layout stage, and tracing gets them to the point they enjoy, which is the actual painting or rendering.  Has any buyer of art looked at a piece they've fallen in love with and really given two figs if the underlying forms were traced or not?  Maybe a few, but likely not the majority.

Certainly not every artist traces. Probably most of those that do don't do it the vast majority of the time, but if they do you'd hope there would be admission if asked.  There's strong temptation not to anyway, given the amount of stigma associated with doing so.  And of course there are many artists whose works are more impressionistic, who don't need to trace at all because accuracy is not an expectation.  There is room for both, neither is necessarily "correct," they're all just making art.  To say that tracing reduces a piece of art is to say that photography does the same, and yet photography is considered an art form in and of itself.

My Stuff

So, you may have noticed that I fall on the side of the fence defending tracing.  Does that mean I do it then?  Does that make me a dirty tracer?

Yes, but not often.

The truth is that I like the process without tracing.  I like learning how to be more accurate in my representations without "cheating" (and I say cheating in that I feel as though I've let myself down, rather than any guilt over who sees what I've been doing).  But I have traced, I will trace again, and I have always stated when I have in the write up here on the blog.  The blog, as you know, is about honesty - I show you the shit as well as the shine, because denying it to you would be denying it to myself, and in doing so I would learn less from the process.

So yes I have.  Let's look at an example:

One thing in that image was traced.  Can you guess what it was without retreating into the original write up and reading for yourself?  No?  Good, because the process didn't really matter.  One of the three faces was traced, one used the grid method and one was done by hand (useful, given the other two can be used as examples in the next two related posts).  if you can't tell the difference then you know two things - The tracing doesn't drastically improve the end result, if just speeds things up a bit, and secondly, tracing doesn't have to be a rote copying of a photograph to still count as tracing.  Oh, you didn't know that second one?  I'll explain in a moment.

Before I do though, I'm serious that I don't trace often, but I have done so.  Not a single one of my speedpaints has been traced that I can recall (and if it was I'd have mentioned it in the write up), and only a handful of my other pieces were either.  This is important not because I'm ashamed of the times that I have (though I did feel guilty, as I've said) and want you to know that I repent my evil ways, but because I want you to understand that if you are the sort of person who frowns upon tracing I'll be clear and upfront about it here on the blog, so you know which pictures you should dislike.  I don't mention it when I post those images elsewhere - as I've said, if you don't care about the process you shouldn't care if it's traced or not, and if you do care then you'll come and read about it here.

Right, methods of tracing (all the following, unless stated, are derived from this stock photograph by AshleyShyD):

This is how your mom traces.  OK, not really, maybe your mom is Kelly Eddington, in which case she could trace the hell out of this - not that Kelly traces at all as far as I'm aware.

I have to tell you, this is really hard to do with a tablet. Doing it over the photograph with tracing paper would be easier, but this took the better part of an hour, and gave me a hand cramp.  When I transfer a sketch onto another piece of paper, as I did here, this is how I do it, but it is my least favourite part of the entire process. No fun at all, and at almost an hour I could have done a digital painting from the same source (and I likely will, at some point).  It wouldn't be as accurate, but it would likely be closer in spirit to the protograph, and more aesthetically pleasing.  The result is ugly, but possibly useful if you're going to spend the next 30 hours painting over it.

When I do trace (other than my own line art), what I do is more like this.

No, it's not pretty, it doesn't need to be.  I suppose you could do some weird things with it and pass it off as a post modern deconstruction or something.  So what's it like that for?   Mostly because it's only covering the bigger, more difficult angles and the overall proportions.  As I've said, I quite like the process, more than this wouldn't be as much fun.  I'm not sure I've ever shown a picture at this stage before (the one for the Doctor, above, I didn't show until I'd added details and sorted out the hair, and I think I may have put in more detail on the initial trace than this too - he's got a hard face to get right), and I usually don't, because unless you're me this isn't going to mean all that much.  The extended lines are to show me things that match up with other things by the way - so here I can see that the basic lines of the eyes and hair across the face line up, as does the peak of the nose at the brows and her pupil on one side, and almost the corner of her hair and her pupil from the other side. This helps with reading things from the original image - you can think of it as an image specific grid if you like (but grids are for next time) - these are much the same relationships I try to spot when speedpainting, but it's much less accurate when doing it by eye.  Compared to your mom's tracing, this one took about three minutes.

For a bit of fun I went back and traced the photograph again a few times more.

I was trying different techniques and different levels of detail here.  The idea in each was not to make the image itself pretty, but to glean different levels of importance from each - to show how different artists could approach the same tasks in different ways due to different priorities and mindsets. Obviously they're all still by me - but now I'm thinking I should do an experiment to actually get other artists to draw over the same photo and see what comes back, that could be quite interesting (but I won't delay this post any further for such an experiment). None of these took more than 10 minutes, and probably a lot less.

And finally this was an attempt to make the tracing in and of itself a fairly pretty piece of art.  I quite like it, but your milage may vary.

Conclusion

So is tracing cheating then?  Well, emotionally I still have a dose of the guilties whenever I do it, because I've always been told it was wrong, and I feel I've let myself down when I do. Actually thinking about it though, I'm much less sure, and feel it's probably just fine, provided the following:

• The artist is capable of a similar level of illustrative competence without relying on tracing, and is using it as one part of a larger process.
• Or the artist is using tracing as a method for working through, or learning things.
• The artist is honest about it's use if asked about technique (I don't think they need to mention it otherwise).

So on that first point, if you go back to the picture of the Doctors and feel that the one I've traced is better than the two I didn't then I really shouldn't have traced it, but personally I feel they're all of a piece, with none clearly better than the rest (one is clearly worse perhaps, but that's a discussion for another post - the one in which I covered the picture in fact).

I've also heard many cries of 'Plagiarism!' regarding artists who trace, but that could apply just as much to artists who copy anything that doesn't strictly belong to them. Whether they trace or not it seems pretty irrelevant to the argument to me.  So I think this is irrelevant to the whole tracing argument too; as long as the Artist is honest about sources it seems artistically fair to me (whether it's legal is another matter entirely, but I'm not a lawyer, so I have no comment there).

And really, that's all I've got to say about tracing.  On the Next A Musing I'll go into Grids, which are much less contentious for some reason, cover a lot of similar ground, and should make for a much easier post to write (because I don't mind telling you that this one took a lot more effort than most).  That one shouldn't be as long coming, as I want to get through these fairly swiftly so I  can talk about light, and how much of what you thought about it was wrong... possibly.

THE END

(1) Yes, I did just link to an Article in the Christian Science Monitor, it's not a site I frequent, but the article was relevant - turns out its nothing like it's title might suggest, so I learned something new there.

(2) It is fairly well accepted that if Vermeer traced at least the layouts for his paintings he likely did so using a simple Camera Obscura. However, an alternative (and more controversial) possibility was proposed by inventor Tim Jenison, and became the subject of the documentary Tim's Vermeer by Penn and Teller.  You can read more about it here.
(3) I read about his invention of the Glass on Easels technique years ago, but I'll be darned if I can find a reputable online reference to it now. He was Da Vinci though, so would you be surprised if he invented such a thing?  It often seems like he invented everything else.  Also, this article is off topic, but I found it interesting.

Less Haste, More Speed

Well, hopefully this is the start of a turn around, as it's only been a week since I last posted. With three speedpaints done then; not enough to show, and seven to show today that's four paintings in a week!  OK, it's actually not since I found one of them down the side of the virtual couch, but still.

Basically last weeks post showed me that I'd been neglecting things far in excess of the amount of other things I had to do, especially for speedpainting.  Usually I wait until I see something I want to paint, and then think "I should paint that."  Time allowing I do so.

Recently though there's been a disconnect between when I see the thing, and when I have time to paint, and with other things crowding my brain I've forgotten about the likely image, or my mood has changed and it doesn't appeal any more.  So now I'm going to make a more concerted effort to stack up likely candidates separately from the rest of my references, so they're easier to go through when I want to paint something quick.

Anyway, you don't care about any of that, you just want to see pictures, right?

Time Taken: 65 minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

After all I just said about keeping references around, here's a painting I did without any.  I realised it had been a while since I'd really thought about the form of the skull - which is of course an enormously useful thing to know when doing portraits - so I thought I should paint one. This is the best skull profile with headphones and a rose I can currently do in 65 minutes.  Don't like the rose?  Here it is again with the rose removed, because it was on a separate layer and my friend Laura said she'd like it more without.  Yay for layers!

So there you go - no references (which is why the teeth are way off - I never really learned teeth in any detail), just me poking at my graphics tablet for an hour in ArtRage.

Nothing amazing to see in a step by step either (I'm doing more of these - it's as much for me to remember how I approached things in future as it is for you to see how I did it now).  The only real thing of note is that I quickly tweaked the shape of the skull so it wasn't as elongated, and I remembered that unless you have an unusually huge jaw it doesn't angle backwards like that - so I'd fixed it in the 4th image here.

I don't recall why I pointed the rose at the back of the head instead of the front - I suspect I didn't think about it at all.  Yeah, it's cliched, but I wanted a bit of stronger colour and something I could paint fairly recognisably with no reference - so rose it was.

Time Taken: 60 minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on this

This, to me, is a good example of how rusty I am doing these things.  Time was when something like this might have taken me half the time; though I think the end result may have been weaker.  Even so, it's an OK piece I guess, despite not really capturing what I liked about the original Photograph, which was it's grainy old documentary look.

Here's the step-by-step (I've chopped off the top, which didn't change much), where I've not really gone for block shapes beyond that of her hair, and instead I've just sort of placed slight blob shapes that eventually coalesce into the more recognisable forms.  It still amazes me how little is needed for the brain to process that something is a face, even if it's not a specific one - that second image explains essentially everything that's going to come  by the end in terms of the position and basic form of her face and hair, while leaving the rest of her body utterly ambiguous - even though I stick to that same basic layout for it right to the end.

Swift Sugar has a bunch of photos in this style; I'm almost certain I'll be returning to them for another painting at some point in order to get closer to what's appealing about them.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4.5
Based on one of these (I can't link to the exact one, but it's in there)

I'm not a fan of this one.  There are aspects of it I'm quite pleased with, but overall I think it's mostly just a blobby mess.  I usually do portraits, and I like doing portraits, but occasionally I like to try something else, and this urban, near post apocalyptic scene appealed to me.  I think I could have done a pretty good job of it if I'd taken a lot longer, but as it is it's a long way from good.

I think the failings come early too.  for something like this to be effective you should be able to squinch your eyes and have the tonal range still make sense, which helps make up for slightly uneven edges and slightly skewed perspective when you get that initial read, but here it really doesn't.  I do quite like some of the worn brick, and the rubble and vegetation in the foreground reads quite well as being in shadow, but overall I think I need to spend more time on layout and getting values right if I'm going to try something like this again (and probably I will).  This was my first piece done with ArtRage 4.5 too, where they've introduced a grid feature.  In this case I might have been wise to use it.

Time Taken: 20 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4.5

I have terrible difficulty when painting with no references.  I know guys who can do it, who only use references for specific things, rather than general layouts, and I am in awe of them.  this is what happens when I just go for it.  I dare say that with years of practice I might get half decent at doing this, but for now you end up with scribbled messes like this one (and, more rarely, ones like the skull up top).

I like some of the ideas in here (Topless while not showing anything, the underwear blending into the bed and so on), but it didn't capture much of what I was actually aiming to achieve.  Maybe I'll have another crack at it one day with more planning, but not as a speedpaint - just off the cuff, this one is a failure.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4.5
Based on this and this

Speaking of the grid feature, as I did before, I used it a little for this one.  I've long had issues with painting things in perspective, and I've gone into some of the reasons for that before, so for this one I divided the image using a 2x2 grid; basically a crosshair.  This was after I'd already taken the original and cropped and rotated it into this composition to work from, and decided I was going to try and match the less extreme palette of the second picture more than the original.

So the crosshair helped me with the layout a bit, without being enough of a grid that I was trying to match every little thing and slowing to a crawl as a result (and this one took far longer than it should have to begin with).  This one was also one I almost gave up on, right before the last image of the top row in the sequence.  That was 45 minutes in, and at that point  the picture is usually starting to come together, and this time I just didn't feel that it was.  So I decided to give it 10 minutes more, and if it was still dreadful I'd give up on it.  The next image in the sequence was about 10 minutes later, and it had improved enough that I decided to carry on. Quite glad I did - I'm fairly happy with the end result despite it taking an additional hour.

Time Taken: 55 Minutes
Software: Art Rage 4.5
Based on this and this

This is an odd one.  I'm not terribly happy with it - it's okay, but to my eyes not exceptionally good or anything.  So it's amusing to me that's it's been one of my most popular images for a while in places I've shown it.  Clearly I am a terrible judge of my own work.

It does mean I'll be doing something along these lines as a finished piece eventually though, because while I'm not happy with the end result it was a lot of fun to paint.  It came about because I really liked both of the source images, and couldn't decide between them, so I thought "why not have both", which has strangle turned out to be the phrase of the week.  Anyway, it was fun to blend two things together during a speedpaint.

Here's the progression, and for a change I'm handling it like a 'real' artist, blocking in the basic shapes, then the major lighting forms, and then building up on top of that.  My personal favourite stage here was the first on the bottom left, where I'd just roughed in her hair, I just like how she looked at that point.  Once I'd introduced the tule behind her, which really doesn't read as such, it just didn't feel as solid to me.

Anyway, the central two images at the bottom do have some differences, despite that not being the case at first glance.  I cleaned up her neck a little, and did some fairly major remodelling of her nose  and facial structure, as well as increasing the amount of eye makeup.

Finally I tried using some very different settings for the oil brush tool when approaching her hair (stiff brush, low pressure), and threw in some red highlights to bring some of the drama of her makeup into her hair.  Someone commented that she looked like Harley Quinn from Batman; maybe that's why this one has been quite popular.

Time Taken: 5 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

This is the one I lost down the back of the sofa.  I did it months ago, not really as a speedpaint, but more as a test of a technique, and then I forgot about it.  Essentially I was trying to come up with a quick and easy method of painting Kirby Krackle, and this was my solution.  It's quite a nice technique for other things too, and is actually very simple - you can see the crackle as you paint, rather than having to run a bunch of filters after the fact.  While  prepping the following image was in fact the first time I'd ever seen the images look like that, as I'd painted the above one with all the layers in place.

So this is less a step by step and more of a 'how did I do that?' (again, as much for my future reference as your interest).  For those curious it's four stacked Photoshop layers  The bottom layer (on the left) is the actual painting, the next layer is the rough pattern to be seen in the krackle, with fairly low opacity to let the painting layer come through (in this case it was a noise layer with the Reticulation filter run on it, and a 25% opacity).  On top of this was a threshold layer, to give it the hard contrasting dots look.  Finally I threw in a red multiplied layer to give it the slightly garish look of Kirby's energy or nebula renderings.

Working that out took a while, but this particular use of it took only 5 minutes.  Its not a great picture, but I found it a lot of fun to play around with.





(As a by the by, Blogger has been having a lot of technical issues today, making writing this post a lot more arduous than it usually is.  No matter to you, but it sure was to me)

Feeble Sketching - January to March '14

Well, I have no idea where the last 6 weeks went.  I know I've been busy, but it's not like I have a lot I can show for it.  3 speedpaints since the last speedpaint post (I think that's an all time low), so I need at least one more before I can post about those; a book cover - which was a fair time sink, but not that bad - and again it'll be a little while until I can post about that; and a whole bunch of work stuff that's off the table for years to come, if I can ever show it at all.  So I've been busy, and when I haven't been I've been spending my time playing video games and watching TV.  I have sketched too, but not in a terribly constructive way.   All in all it's been a bad few weeks for anything worth putting on the blog, and let's face it, it's not been the best year for it either.  Hopefully things will smooth out soon.  Until then, here are some terrible sketches I did between January and March of this year.

So January was the most productive month of the three, but as you can see, there wasn't a lot of quality in with the quantity.  Of all these sketches there's only one I actively like (the woman close to the top left corner), and the rest is downhill from there.  I've been told the more fleshed out sketch on the right side (near the top right corner) looks a bit like 'Flowers' from Agents of Shield, and while I watch the show it wasn't consciously supposed to be her.  The only other sketch of note is the large headed tentacle fellow near the middle bottom.  He's actually based on a pattern of condensation I saw on the garage window one morning.  I should probably take him further one day, but for now this is as good as he gets.

February had some moderately better stuff than January, but not a lot of it.  This is basically everything I drew that month, bar a handful of thumbnails so faint I couldn't scan them.  Really not much else to say about any of them really.

Again, this is basically the totality of my sketching in March.  Well, I say that, but it's only if you don't include all the robots.  Nothing exciting, though I'm quite fond of 'bewildered superman' near the left side, and I really have a soft spot for the woman in the bottom left.  For some reason she reminds me of Michelle Pfeiffer, despite looking not a jot like her (Hmmm... I should do a Michelle Pfeiffer painting soon).

So that was it for three very disappointing months. I think the next handful were fairly sparse also, but things do pick up a little further along.  Maybe I'll get around to posting the next few next month, leaving only one post before I'm back up to date.  I actually finished off my latest sketchbook today; the first one that took over a year to fill (which should tell you something).

Sorry for the lack of, well, anything, recently.  I'm hopeful I can get that turned around fairly soon.

Social Profiling № 9: Smile!

And here, finally, is the post I was planning to put up last week.  All the prep work on the images was done for that post, so this should go fairly quickly.

Before I begin though, I'm going to digress and mention (for my own future reference, as much as your general interest), that in the last week one of our cats has gone missing, and we have a large hole in the house boarded up with plywood from where the new sliding door was supposed to go in, but couldn't because of rot in a support beam.  The frustrating thing about the later being that the former could have come home, but would have no way of letting us know because his usual entrance is now covered with boards.  Bugger.

Oh, and a stray cat showed up at one point (possibly to relay a message from the missing one, which was useless since we don't speak cat), stayed over night but ran away when it was time to call animal control.  One of those weeks.

Anyway, enough about me, and on to the wonder of fake paint!

You may note that there are two versions of this painting above, each a slightly different colour.  No I'm not trying to riff on Andy Warhol (but running out of steam after two images), I just can't decide which version I like best.  The original is on the top, the second one is colour tweaked in Photoshop.  Neither of them is the colour of the original photograph, which was straight black and white.  You can enlarge all the images by clicking on them by the way - some of them you may need to.

So, learning from my terrible layout sketch from the last one I decided to A) Forego all that m'larky up front and just start painting and B) use a grid this time.  I didn't use a grid for long, just long enough to get the big bold shapes in roughly the right places.  I stopped using it somewhere in between the first and second stages above.  Even then I put his eye in the wrong place.  It didn't take long for me to notice and fix it, but long enough that  it irritated me when I did.  It's more or less right in the last of these stages here.  For this one I saw no reason to change the composition of the Photograph at all - the original photograph was already fantastic, so I left it as was, but just painted it in sepia tones.

Here's me, refining the facial features.  There's really not much else to say about this one.  Hmmm, OK, so the photo this was based on had a fair amount of damage in places, so I had to infer quite a bit about the left side of his mouth and chin.

This piece, by the way, is of the person's father, who has passed away - as has mine, you may recall.  This bit is relevant.  So when my Dad died my mother commissioned an artist to paint his portrait to give to my Grandmother.  I was never terribly impressed by the painting (though it is vastly better than I could do, especially with real paint), there was something off about the eyes that lost a lot of his character.  Anyway, I didn't want the same thing to happen here for someone else, so I put more work into it than I probably otherwise would have.

I have no idea if I succeeded in capturing that character or not, but I did the best I could.  Oh, and another coincidence - this person has also hired me before.  Two out of four - it's not like I get hired all that much! Very strange coincidence.

Oh, and I cropped it off, because it hadn't changed before the next set of pictures, but I'd blocked in his left hand here too.

Some very minor work continuing on his face, mostly at his hairline and at the base of his nose, but the majority of this sequence is spent on his right hand and shirt.  I never did get around to detailing out his little finger, but I don't think it's noticeable in the final piece unless it's pointed out... Which I just did...  Way to go me, now you can't unsee it.

Not much to say about the shirt, except that I've shaved off an awful lot of his shoulder since that first block in, giving a bit more definition to the cloth and his neck.

I've also painted in some of the damage that was in the original photograph in the third one here.  The small pieces of damage I didn't do, because they weren't helping the piece, but this big swath of light burning in the bottom and the right of the picture I thought looked great, so I added it here.

Finally getting to making the camera look like a camera.  I debated over whether to do the lens freehand, but eventually I used a stencil (I argued, with myself, that if it was a real painting I could cut a mask out of a piece of card for this bit).  Only the outer circle was done with the stencil though, and I painted over the result afterward so that the circle wasn't too perfect and in conflict with the rough nature of the rest of the picture.  More on the camera in a moment.

Here is also where I painted in his hair, and did some general blending before adding the trees.  Painting his hair was interesting - I went a little too detailed to begin with, and you can still see the remainder of this as a slightly noisy patch right at the top of his head.  Painted over that with a bigger brush though, and ended up getting it to look like his fine buzzcut even though the individual strokes are quite large.

I faired less well with the trees behind him, but I got them to the point where they weren't too distracting.  I was tempted to leave the background being much more stark and graphic, but I wanted it to be evident that he's outside, so the trees had to happen.

Finally I took it into Photoshop and played with the colour values for the second version.  The bit in Photoshop took all of 10 minutes.

If you're interested, the camera is a Falcon Minette, or a Miniature, or a Minicam Juniour (my money is on the former). Apparently these were made back in the 40's, which feels period accurate to the photo, though I had it pegged for the 50's when painting (which it could be - they made things to last back then).  The easiest way to tell is from the label around the lens.  Amusingly I didn't think of doing the corrections to see what it actually said until I was finished and working on the thumbnail for the post, at which point I'd painted the logo from a reference that was backwards and rotated and blurred.  I'm quite pleased at how close I got to the real thing as a result.

And that, for this tale, is the end.

Social Profiling № 8: All in the Eyes

Well, this was embarrassing.  I'd started prepping for today's Social Profiling post, when I realised I hadn't written the last one! So now this is that and I'll write the new one later.  How did I miss one? Well, I painted it way back at the end of February, and as you may recall March was, well, a little full, so I honestly thought I'd already written the post, when in fact I'd not even prepped the images for it.   It's been that sort of year.

So, anyway, I'm getting to it now, just over 4 months later.  Oh, and I didn't post last week because it was a choice of painting the latest Social Profiling picture (not this one, remember?  I just mentioned that, try and keep up), or writing a post, and painting won.  Then I hurt my back, so that painting took longer than planned (in terms of days from start to finish, not actual hours spent).  OK, all up to speed now?  Good, lets look at this picture then.

And there we have her.  OK, all done, onto the next!




I'm kidding, obviously. Just because it's late doesn't mean I'm going to skimp on the coverage, though I've obviously forgotten some things what with it being 4 months since I painted it.  I'll do my best though.

Unlike the last one, or the next, I decided to actually do a sketch for this one.  'Save rework with repositioning things,' I said.  'Should be pretty easy to just measure it,' I said.  'What a complete idiot,' I said, two hours later.

You see I wasn't using a grid or just eyeballing it, but actually measuring things with my stylus, calipers and thumb.  I learned two important things: 1) Trying to measure from a photograph reliably without actually touching it is a mug's game (because the image is obviously skewed slightly in your vision, unlike a real thing, which isn't flat, so can't be skewed).  2) Lineart can be deceptive.  You see I thought that looked fine - I still think it doesn't look too bad there, but when I painted over it...  Well, see for yourself.

Arrrgh!  What have I done!  It is the end of times! The dogs are cuddling the cats! Rains of bloooood! Etc, Etc.  Yes, this didn't turn out right at all.  Was it because of the skewed photo effect?  Or a miss measure of a distance or an angle somewhere?  Don't know, don't care - the results are freakish either way.  Poor woman has had her head swelled up like a balloon!

See how deceptive that line art was?  Or can you see it even there (I can't, evidently)?  Well, anyway, I needed a quick fix.  Oh, how sad that I laid it out first to avoid rework later, for it was all for naught.

So, I threw up a big grid (4x3ish), and massaged things a bit.  The grid wasn't on the painting, it was mostly just to use to see what was lining up and where.  That helped a lot as you can see above, though her left eye was still slightly off (What is it and me with left eyes?), but I fixed that as I went along.  Oh, and remember last time I said about there being coincidences in these images (of course you don't, the last was in January)?  Well, two of them ended up being for people I've done images for before.  This one is of these guy's mother.

Just a good mid point to see a full image.  It was here that I think the most important part was painted too.  I really wanted to get her eyes right, and I think I got very close.  Lovely eyes, even on the original (fairly grainy) photograph, so I felt it vitally important to capture them as accurately as possible.

So here you can see more development in the face and hair.  I've broadened her jaw on the right image as it was a little flatter than in the original photograph, and was starting to make it look like she had no chin.  The hair I kept super rough - I felt that that way it wouldn't draw away from her face particularly.  Oh, and purple hair?  Totally badass.

After that I just roughed in her shirt and hoodie (not too much detail, for the same reason as the hair), and added her necklace.  I suppose I should go into how I painted this, as it wasn't my usual method.  I used ArtRage's oil brush (as usual), but this time I had it on a higher opacity paint (less thinners), but with very little pressure.  I thought that might capture some of the noise I was actually digging in the original photograph, and I think to some degree I succeeded.  Yay.

OK, off again now.  I have to send some text to someone that's been delayed by a week due to that bad back, and I also need to write another post  - but not for today, so don't come back too soon.

Really, I'm gone.  Try not to think of the balloon head stage when going to bed tonight m'kay?  Nightmare fuel right there.

Speeding Through It All

Whenever I do a speedpaint post I think to myself "Well, I only have 4 or 5 images to show, how long could writing that take?" and then I actually go an look and it's more like 6 to 8 images, so it's going to take longer than I thought.  6 to 8 isn't bad going, especially since it feels like I've barely set aside any time for them recently.  And I really haven't - most of these are very, very quick studies, for various reasons.

I still have a lot on my plate  over the next few weeks, but it's not always easy to find the time in between my day job, and the stuff I do for Dr. Sandifer.  Last week, as an example, I was working on an image for work in my spare time. It wasn't an official image, but I needed to demonstrate something at a presentation, and didn't have time to both write the presentation and do the artwork without working on it at home.  No, you can't see it, at least not yet.  Maybe one day, when what it refers to is no longer under wraps.

SO yeah, I've been falling behind on my art practice, and I'm honestly at a bit of a loss to where all the time goes, but it does go, and it goes fast.   Speaking of fast...

Time Taken: 35 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

 So I spent a while messing around with brushes and the new color picker I have for Photoshop.  This started in the last speed post, as you may or may not remember, but I carried on with that theme for a bit.  This is just a simple greyscale sketch with no reference used.  Not very exciting, but there's something I like about it anyway.  I painted the background with a fairly random brush, and then filled in the details with a more detailed one, basing those details on the shapes formed with the big random one.

Time Taken: 5 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

This might be the shortest paint I've ever done.  I was mucking around with brushes, did a scribble with this one, and could basically see this on the screen.  All I had to do was fill in the other tones.  Once I'd done that he looked Native American (or American Indian if you prefer, I know there's some contention over that), so I sketched in the feathers.  I quite like it, even if it is pretty rough.

Time Taken: 45 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

I feel bad about this, as I often do when I can't give an original source for an images reference, but I liked the photo and painted it because I was in the mood, and only discovered I couldn't find the credits after the fact.  Yes, I'm a terrible person, and no, a reverse image search didn't help much.  If you know who's photo this is, or who the subject is then let me know and I'll credit them properly, but until then, you can find the original here.  Very poor show on my part, especially so as it's one of two images with this issue this post.

Still, this was more messing about with Photoshop. In this case I went ahead and used the Gaussian Blur filter, because why not? And it gave the picture a nice depth that I wouldn't otherwise know how to achieve (not without spending longer on it than intended anyway).  After that I threw in two layers, one for the quick layout, and one for the actual painting.  I didn't add any additional layers after that, and when I was done I turned off the sketch layer.   Nothing too taxing, and I'm not a huge fan of the result, but I've done a lot worse.  Nothing too fancy about the method of painting; I picked colours and painted them - I really wasn't thinking about this one terribly hard, which made for a relaxing paint even if not the best result.

Time Taken: 65 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

More brush tests.  This time a spiky one, a noisy one, a flat one and a cloudy one.  I don't much like the results here, but I'd honestly be hard pressed to tell you why.  Is it the colour range (which I'm pretty sure is way off the source photograph, which was my own), or bad perspective, or what?  I think I need more practice on environmental paintings.  The clouds came out well though.  I like that cloud brush; I think it will prove very useful on occasion.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

Used another filter on this one, right at the end.  Ran sharpen on it and liked the result, so I left it.  This one is the other one with no direct credit.   Image search returns a Japanese term that apparently means Personality Hairstyles, which doesn't help much.  The original is tucked away here, but again I will gladly give credit where it's due.

So I quite like this one.  Again it was the result of mucking around with brushes, but I like the result.  For all that though it's a little embarrassing looking at the stages picture here because I didn't notice until quite late that I'd put her eye in completely the wrong place.  When I finally did notice it didn't take long at all to move it to a better location, but it does look a bit strange.  My original intention was to paint the whole thing with the spiky brush you can see I've used in the first stage, but I quickly realised that that was going to look awful, so I switched to a more traditional one for the rest of the painting.  I picked this one because I really like the graphic nature of her shirt,  I'd be tempted to make a more finished piece out of it if I had any idea who to give the original credits too.  Maybe I'll just do something unrelated, but use this as inspiration.

Time Taken: 25 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC
Are you bored with these quick Photoshop brush tests yet?  Well, the good news is that the next one is in ArtRage.  This one is a wolf - hopefully that's self evident, but maybe not.  All done using one brush type (it's the spiky one again, only really big), and black and white.  There's not much else to say about it, I just let the brush do most of the work to be honest.  Yes, I had to provide some guidance, but it's the brush that provided the nice sketchy finish.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

After all that I needed a break from Photoshop (though I did convince myself that I might be able to do a finished piece in it at some point), and went back to ArtRage.  This piece is based on 'David 12' by faestock.  I liked the expression.  I wish I could tell you more than that, but I just fell into my old speedpaint habits for the most part.

Oh, and I cheated, sort of.  You can see there are some marks on the step by step stages above that disappear at the end; two on the right, and one in the middle at the top.  That's my "grid".  It's not much of a grid, especially since I eyeballed it, but it did help a lot with getting the layout worked out, so I may be doing that again.

Since it was done in ArtRage, and because I remembered before closing it, I managed to record a timelapse from my undo stages.  It's a bit jumpy right at the beginning, but it settles down before I paint the portrait proper.  You can even see me add those marks.

There you go, 7 paints for the price of 4.  I'll be back again as soon as I get time, but until then, arrivederci.