Such Speed and Tom Foolery

Yeah, it's been a while, and last month only had three posts rather than the four I'd rather have, but things got a little hectic what with the space-alien abduction and my son building a particle accelerator in the basement (blew all the circuit breakers!). Oh, and my wife finally took the time she'd been meaning to in order to build a shed that looks like the TARDIS, except it actually works and now every time I see her she's six months older and has an alternating tan.
Other than that though it really has been a little hectic in work and at home, but I have found time to do a handful of speedpaints, which I shall present to you below (and no, there's no more April 1st 'humor' in the post, promise).

Time Taken: 20 Minutes

Yeah, it's extremely rough. It's also not based on any reference, so despite it not being great I still think it's a step forward. There's better stuff below, honest.

Time Taken: 55 Minutes

I'd taken this photo of my Son's old shoes ages ago (when they weren't his old shoes) and then promptly forgot about it. I found it again while I was casting around for something to paint, and couldn't remember why I hadn't done so already. The perspective of the front on the closest shoe is a bit wonky, but other than that I'm quite happy with it.

Time Taken: 40 Minutes

This one if from the same batch as the shoe photo, taken at a car show last year. I don't like it much, though the car isn't as bad as it could be given that there were two people standing right in front of it that I decided not to paint (said people being wife and child, I may use them as reference for another picture later on).

Time Taken: 55 Minutes

I was concerned that my work wasn't really colourful enough. Even when the source was colourful (such as the child catcher) I wasn't feeling as though my stuff was capturing the vibrancy at all. My solution tot his was to pick two or three bright colours, and then paint the whole thing using them (I think I actually used four, including the black). It's based on a photo of a model I've had on my hard drive for an age, not sure who she is. Oh, and I painted more of it than this, and did a recolour as a test. It looks better cropped down and in the original colour though.

Time taken: (25x3+10) 85 Minutes

This one was really experimental for me. I took the source photo (this one) and split the image into the channels for Red, Green and Blue and saved them as three images. I painted versions of the three images (one on top of the other to keep them sort of lined up) in Artrage and then saved those as three new images. Then I reveresd the process and turned the new images into the Red, Green and Blue channels of a final image in Photoshop. Gives a weird effect, but it is pretty tricky to do. Here's a shot of the three paintings with the result, representing red and green on the top, and blue on the bottom.

In order to save time (since this was an experiment)I did do a quick trace of the source image before I started - just the rough shape of her head and the location of her eyes and mouth. I neglected to add a new layer afterwards though, so it got painted over - if you look hard enough perhaps you can still see it (I'm pretty sure you can't).

I really like this idea as it's something you can really only do digitally (I guess you could split and composite them photographically, but who'd bother?). Might try this again one day.

Time Taken: 75 Minutes

The time actually includes the two previous goes I had since I did them all in one session. Unfortunately I just kept painting, so the previous tries are lost under layers of paint. It's all a bit rough, and looks far better as a thumbnail than a full sized image.

I've been avoiding working on hands really, and it's about time I actually got around to studying them - that would have made this piece a bit easier. Truth is though that I keep saying "I should work on my hand anatomy (along with forearm anatomy)" but then when it comes to doing it I'm just bored by them - on their own they're not terribly interesting - it's in conjunction with other things that hands gain interest (to me anyway). I should just suck it up and go practice crazy on hands (and feet, which I've done a little more on, but not much).  Anyway, I found this stock image and decided that perhaps hands could be interesting on their own, and this is the result.

Anyway, enough about painting and such. You'll have to manage without me for the next few weeks (I know, it's terribly difficult) - unfortunately I won't be in a position to update the blog until the end of the month, and possibly not until May (this includes the sketches for March - You'll get March and April both covered in May). Hopefully I'll have time to put together a post for the blog's 2nd birthday. It's only a few weeks, I'm sure you can find something else to read in the mean time. :) Oh, and I forgot to give this a title when it was first posted. Silly me.