And a Small Hat

It was only supposed to be a speedpaint, and turned into my favourite piece so far.  You may not agree, and that's entirely fine, but I'm really pleased how this piece worked out.  It's not perfect of course - there are aspects that make me cringe, but as an overall piece this, in my opinion, is the best I've done.  The major problem with it is that it's quite small, because I usually do speed paints at screen resolution, so when you enlarge this one it might not enlarge as much as you'd expect - that said, it will give you ample scale to see my wonky brushwork.  After all that build up I suppose I should show the piece then eh?

And there you have it.  OK, looks like I can knock off early this time...  No?  Oh, okay, then I'd better go back to the beginning.

I found this nice texture in one of my reference folders.  I have no idea where it came from, but seeing as some of my texture references are 12 years old or more this is no surprise.  Still, I like the texture and thought it would be an interesting one to paint on.  I think it's plywood or something.  Anyway, I made a mental note and when I stumbled across this stock art from SenoritaPepitaStock on Deviantart I thought "hey, that shot would make a good speedpaint on that wood texture".  In my head I could see it as a caricature, so I got started.

As I said in the previous post I don't usually draw a rough for a speedpaint, but in this case I felt it would be prudent given that I was planning for exaggeration of the proportions.   Since I was still planning to spend maybe an hour on the piece this was done rather quickly; maybe 10 minutes.  You'll note there's a blob of paint where her left eye is - I'd plopped it down before I decided to paint on a new layer, and since I didn't save at this point it's there for all eternity now.  If you're wondering how I have this if I didn't save it, it's the next image with the paint layer turned off - the wonders of modern technology.

35 minutes in, or there about.  It was going well, but I didn't like her face (in the painting, Senorita Pepita's face is just fine), so I decided to repaint her eyes and nose, and in a rare decision, I decided to save it.  So, this is what speed paints look like halfway through - this didn't end up being a very speedy paint, but I didn't know that at the time.  Anyway, I repainted her eyes and nose and tweaked her mouth.

At this point I was 50 minutes down and realizing I wasn't going to finish all the other bits inside an hour.  Usually I would just say to myself "Fine, this one can run 90 minutes," but in this case I was literally out of time as we had to go out after the hour, so I saved the piece here and figured I'd chalk it up as a gonner (I've only ever had one speedpaint I didn't finish in one sitting, and one I've never finished - I'm trying not to make a habit of it).  I was going to show it at this stage, but I had no intention of doing any more to it.  Yeah, that worked out...

Anyway, just in case you're not seeing huge differences in the face in the last two images here's a shot of them side by side.
So, obviously I did continue with it.  The image was stuck in my head and I wasn't going to be happy until it was done.  It was at this point I decided to spend more than another 40 minutes on it, but at the same time I didn't want to end up with 20+ hours spent as I did on the piece of Aimee (more news about that piece at some point by the way, but not today).  In the end I probably spent about 5 hours on it, but I'm not 100% sure exactly how long .

Here's a shot of her hat roughed in, and a start made on her jacket.  This makes it look like I painted the jacket detail in about 10 minutes, but it took ages because I couldn't get the level of contrast in the satin the way I wanted it.  I think in the original image she's wearing brushed suede or something, but I had no clue how to paint that, so I went with satin instead.  The shape of the jacket has also been cleaned up quite a bit from the speedpaint version.

She's no longer suffering from baldness, although I've added no detail to her hair at this point, and the rest of the jacket is roughed out (the left side, towards us, is pretty much finished though).  I also painted over the background to give a more textured look.  Nothing exciting, but it focuses the eye on the centre.  By the way, you may notice the cropping is different from the finished version I posted - this is because I painted it at screen resolution and I have a wide aspect ration monitor - I felt the squarer cropping would work better at the end, so these are just cropped so she's central, rather than to match the final image.

And here she is almost finished.  I've done more work to her face (see below), finished the jacket and corset (though I painted it as a flat to the jacket as I felt that was more interesting), given her a nice clossy head of hair and completed the hat.  After this I painted a lighter spot in the background (for contrast) and her jewelry.  She has no earing in the original photo, and I felt that she didn't need me to be adding one - that ear was a bugger to get right by the way.

Finally here's the 4 stages of painting her face and hair.  The last image is just small tweaks, such as adding highlights to her cheekbones and making her lips a little more delicate, that sort of thing, but it does show how it went from being speedpaint rough to looking quite nice.

And there you have it - my last painting of 2011.  Only sketches to go and we're all caught up and ready to roll with 2012.