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)
Love it. So glad there Dad did too.
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