Right Up To Ludicrous Speed

Keeping fairly true to promise for a change, here we are again with another round of speed paints. Less of them, but more often. Despite the post's title I've found that my speed painting is slowing down. They quite regularly take more than an hour now, which is just not cool (the occasional hour+ piece is fine, but this was more often than not). I'm making a concentrated effort to do them faster again now I've noticed this trend, but this can mean that some of them are only partially complete or look very rough. Such is the nature of speedpaints.
So, let's take look at what I've done in the past month or so...

Time Taken - 90 Minutes

This was taken from stock by "spiked-Stock" on DeviantArt. I liked the pose a lot (I stumbled across it while looking for reference I ended up not using for the sketches in the last post), but flipped it and painted it a little more blue. I've done a terrible job capturing her likeness, but that wasn't really the pint of the piece. One of the reason's this one took so long was because I was using the art marker tool instead of oils. I like how they look, but I find them hard to work with (they tend to blend in unexpected ways). Don't be surprised if you see more from this stock source at some point.

Time Taken - 85 Minutes

This one is not worth time time it took in my opinion. You can clearly see who it's supposed to be I suppose, but it looks more like a nasty vector piece than a nice dynamic speedpaint. This is one I'm 80% sure I'll some back to at some point, there's potential here, but this isn't showing it.

Incidentally, this was one of those rare speedpaints where I took a little time to do some lineart before I started with the paint (this contributed to the extended time on this one as the sketch took 25 minutes. I think I like the sketch better than the extended work, so here it is for you to see.

You see, I think this is far more interesting stylistically than the end result... I wonder if I can transfer some of that style into paint, and not worry so much about getting it looking realistic... If you're not recognizing the subject it's Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in the Film Blade Runner

Time Taken - 50 Minutes

This was a bit more speedy, and with the exception of one small thing I think it came out really well. It's a self portrait done for my various profile pictures. I like that it's sort of conflicting as to what's going on - is it suicide or murder? Is there nothing in there to block the water or are those brains on the right? It's all just a bit of fun, but it does look quite a bit like me. The thing I'm not happy with (if you're interested) is the hand and arm holding the gun. I probably could have fixed it if I'd been willing to spend longer on it, but as a speedpaint it had run it's course.

Time Taken - 35 Minutes

Yes, this is as big as I painted it. I was going to paint a series of faces, each with a different base hue, but my son needed me after the first one and I never got back to it. I'm not happy with the placement of her eyes (they're too lose together), but other than that it's OK. It's based on a picture I found through Google image search. It's got some cool search features these days, so you can tell it to just show faces and restrict the colour palette to a given colour, which is what I did. I've had the picture for a while though, so I no longer remember where I actually got it or who she is. Terrible I know.

And in a serendipitous bit of timing my son needs me...

Time Taken - 5 Minutes

I've never really said before, but my speedpaints really don't take exactly the time I say they do - I tend to round them up to the nearest 5 minutes to save having to be very precise about timing them. So this one may have taken more like 4 minutes and 3 seconds or something, I'm not exactly sure... However long it took it's not terribly good, but I do think there's some good stuff happening here given the time taken and that I had no reference; it could have gone interesting places if I'd pushed on with it. I honestly don't remember why I didn't

Time Taken - 65 Minutes

My son wanted to paint Iron-Man with me. This is not that piece (that's below) but after we were done I wondered how much better a job I could do without him sliding on and off my knee, his head bobbing in the way of my vision and his hand constantly nudging mine (this during the bits he wanted me to paint of course, his bits he stayed pretty still for. So, it's OK, but Iron-Man is way to complex a shape for ah hour I think (I cropped off the rest of the arms because they were just shapeless red blobs). I'm still not happy, but it did come out better than the version with my boy...

And to be fair to him all the stuff is the right colour and in the right place, he just hasn't got the shapes down yet (the yellow stuff to the left is mine). The original photo has an orangy/yellow robot visible behind Iron-Man's head for example. I think he did rather well all things considered.

Time Taken - 35 Minutes

I wanted to drag the time of my paints back down kicking and screaming, and this was the result. It's based on yet more stock, this time from Marcus Ranum, who also does some top quality photography. Aspects of this are a bit rough (partly due to the speed I was going, something I'm out of practice with again) but overall I think I got the essence of the original photograph, and his neck area turned out pretty well IMO.

By the way, the title of the post is a quote from Spaceballs, if you were curious.