So DeviantArt, of which I am a member (Despite the name, the majority of art there is not deviant) has groups, one of which is the official ArtRage group, of which I'm also a member, because ArtRage is awesome, and extremely affordable for what it is (I'm not kidding, it's crazy cheap for the available feature set). The ArtRage group started having competitions, so I thought I'd enter the first, the theme of which was "portraits." I entered one, a commision on which I've posted here already, but I wanted another, so I came up with the following.
It didn't win.
Are you suprised? I really wasn't (I wouldn't have minded being in the "honourable mentions", but really I'm not terribly taken aback that it didn't even make that), so I doubt you are. Still, as I mentioned, I tried some new things, and it does have some interesting things going on, so I'll cover it here anyway.
First up, I trawled through some of the stockart I've got accumulated from DeviantArt (and by some I mean loads), because that seemed somehow appropriate. I wanted something that was fairly stark, and slightly graphic, but with a fairly realistic face. I found the following (no particular order) and thought mashing them together might make for an interesting result:
Blonde Redhead by NikxStock
Ribbon by jlior
You can probably tell which bits became what for yourself, though you can see in more detail in a moment. The ribbon was not something I was originally thinking about, nor was the orange hair (though I did want someone with a bob type haircut), but when I saw these I thought 'Yeah, I should use those', and in fact the orange hair eventually drove the predominant colour of the image.
This is some of that stock quickly glommed together in Photoshop to give me a layout and to see if the colours I was thinking might work. Of course I changed the colour when I got to painting, and in retrospect that may have been a mistake (see the end of the post if you want to decide for yourself). Nothing fancy going on here - this didn't need to look polished, it just had to prove the concept to me.
Here's the sketch that came next. I used a grid to transfer the location of big landmarks to get the proportion right (you can see the layout lines for the eyes and bow if you look hard enough), and then just sketched in the rest on top. The coat was just sketched in roughly with no real guide, though I had no intention of putting all that much detail into the coat, I thought it might prove useful if I decided to add more detail later.
Over into ArtRage 4. That's significant because for this I was determined to use 4 instead of the Studio Pro version because 4 has many features the earlier one doesn't, even though the way the oil paint works seems odd to me after the previous package. Up until now I've predominantly used Studio Pro as a result.
You can see that she's not looking terribly good here though - I'm just blocking in the forms really. You may note that some of those forms, and much of the background, don't really change between this and the finished piece. For those elements I wanted a rough and ready look, and I think the contrast between the detailed face and more loose surround are one thing that works quite well here. I've also turned off the lineart at this point, and I barely refer to it for the remainder of the painting, until the very end.
Here's a rare look at what my view in ArtRage is like. Nothing fancy really - there's the overview of the canvas on the left, and a reference image of the Cyber Queen stock to refer to. On the right are my layers (one for the lineart, one for the painting - yes, this was all just two layers), and a mixing pad. The mixing pad is one of the reasons I did this in AR4 specifically. It's called a "scrap" and you can use it for various things, such as sketching, notes, or mixing colours. Yes, there's a colour picker in the bottom corner, but I wanted more practice at mixing paint, so the only thing I used the picker for were the first 10 boxes in that swatch sample collection to the right - after that everything was either mixed on the scrap of picked from the canvas (no, you can't do that with real paint obviously - life would be so much easier if you could).
Here's some of the development on one of the eyes. I've glommed it all into one sheet so I don't have to write much about it. You can also see how I worked out some of the orange bounce light from the hair that's not yet painted. Terribly exciting I'm sure. You can enlarge images by clicking on them as usual by the way.
And here's the process on that very same hair. I made a mistake with it at first and went too pure with the yellowish highlights, but I toned it down as I revised it. I sort of wish I'd left the hair poking over her collar there. I would have made it the far collar rather than a split in the near collar if I had done that. I probably should have lightened her eyebrows rather more too. Oh well, retrospect is a wonderful thing eh?
This was almost complete - I did another pass on the bow, after this, and brought in some of the original sketch to make it look rougher around the edges (I also darkened her eyes a little more, though that wasn't done with the sketch layer, and added some contrasting colour eye makeup). I also tried some new techniques on her skin using the airbrush tool to get a more natural mottled look and small pores. You can't really see those in the final image, but it's visible in the closeup below.
This one in fact. You may need to click to expand to see it, but you can see the airbrush best in the highlights on each cheek, and where I used both the airbrush and the oil brush tool with very high thinners and low pressure to mark some of the skin mottling there. Good technique I think, I may use it again.
And here we have the traditional progression gif; but only focused on the face since the rest of it barely changed.
And finally, I did some colour tweaking in Photoshop afterwards to see how she might have looked if I'd stuck with something more along the lines of the original colours from the mockup. I like it a lot more in retrospect (yay retrospect, again), but since it's really too late for that now this is the only place you'll see it (at least as posted by me - I can't stop other people posting it any old where).
You can probably tell which bits became what for yourself, though you can see in more detail in a moment. The ribbon was not something I was originally thinking about, nor was the orange hair (though I did want someone with a bob type haircut), but when I saw these I thought 'Yeah, I should use those', and in fact the orange hair eventually drove the predominant colour of the image.
This is some of that stock quickly glommed together in Photoshop to give me a layout and to see if the colours I was thinking might work. Of course I changed the colour when I got to painting, and in retrospect that may have been a mistake (see the end of the post if you want to decide for yourself). Nothing fancy going on here - this didn't need to look polished, it just had to prove the concept to me.
Here's the sketch that came next. I used a grid to transfer the location of big landmarks to get the proportion right (you can see the layout lines for the eyes and bow if you look hard enough), and then just sketched in the rest on top. The coat was just sketched in roughly with no real guide, though I had no intention of putting all that much detail into the coat, I thought it might prove useful if I decided to add more detail later.
Over into ArtRage 4. That's significant because for this I was determined to use 4 instead of the Studio Pro version because 4 has many features the earlier one doesn't, even though the way the oil paint works seems odd to me after the previous package. Up until now I've predominantly used Studio Pro as a result.
You can see that she's not looking terribly good here though - I'm just blocking in the forms really. You may note that some of those forms, and much of the background, don't really change between this and the finished piece. For those elements I wanted a rough and ready look, and I think the contrast between the detailed face and more loose surround are one thing that works quite well here. I've also turned off the lineart at this point, and I barely refer to it for the remainder of the painting, until the very end.
Here's a rare look at what my view in ArtRage is like. Nothing fancy really - there's the overview of the canvas on the left, and a reference image of the Cyber Queen stock to refer to. On the right are my layers (one for the lineart, one for the painting - yes, this was all just two layers), and a mixing pad. The mixing pad is one of the reasons I did this in AR4 specifically. It's called a "scrap" and you can use it for various things, such as sketching, notes, or mixing colours. Yes, there's a colour picker in the bottom corner, but I wanted more practice at mixing paint, so the only thing I used the picker for were the first 10 boxes in that swatch sample collection to the right - after that everything was either mixed on the scrap of picked from the canvas (no, you can't do that with real paint obviously - life would be so much easier if you could).
Here's some of the development on one of the eyes. I've glommed it all into one sheet so I don't have to write much about it. You can also see how I worked out some of the orange bounce light from the hair that's not yet painted. Terribly exciting I'm sure. You can enlarge images by clicking on them as usual by the way.
And here's the process on that very same hair. I made a mistake with it at first and went too pure with the yellowish highlights, but I toned it down as I revised it. I sort of wish I'd left the hair poking over her collar there. I would have made it the far collar rather than a split in the near collar if I had done that. I probably should have lightened her eyebrows rather more too. Oh well, retrospect is a wonderful thing eh?
This was almost complete - I did another pass on the bow, after this, and brought in some of the original sketch to make it look rougher around the edges (I also darkened her eyes a little more, though that wasn't done with the sketch layer, and added some contrasting colour eye makeup). I also tried some new techniques on her skin using the airbrush tool to get a more natural mottled look and small pores. You can't really see those in the final image, but it's visible in the closeup below.
This one in fact. You may need to click to expand to see it, but you can see the airbrush best in the highlights on each cheek, and where I used both the airbrush and the oil brush tool with very high thinners and low pressure to mark some of the skin mottling there. Good technique I think, I may use it again.
And here we have the traditional progression gif; but only focused on the face since the rest of it barely changed.
And finally, I did some colour tweaking in Photoshop afterwards to see how she might have looked if I'd stuck with something more along the lines of the original colours from the mockup. I like it a lot more in retrospect (yay retrospect, again), but since it's really too late for that now this is the only place you'll see it (at least as posted by me - I can't stop other people posting it any old where).
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