In other related news I'm taking a break from doing the commissions for a little bit in order to focus on improvement. People still want them, and I'd like to do them, but I feel bad taking peoples hard earned when there's improvement to be had (plus, they're a lot of work), so on with that for a few weeks before the money raking (hah!) can continue.
I've also co-started a group at work dedicated to that very improvement. I'm very happy with the response so far as we have artist and non artist alike all wanting to improve. We're not doing lessons and such (so far), it's more like a Weight Watchers type setup where we all admit that we suck and give each other support to improve. Expect to see some of my results appearing in the blog in future - right now I'm drawing a page of circles every night for two weeks, I'm sure you can hardly wait to gaze upon those those now can you?
OK, enough preamble...
Time Taken: 1 hour
My friend took a photo of these peaks in the Gower (look it up) with her phone and then posted it to friendface. Naturally I jumped on it immediately and, with her permission, painted it. It's not an exact copy, but it's close enough, and it's been a while since I've painted anything landscape like. If I'd spent about another hour on it it could have looked really good I think (not planning to though).
Time Taken: 35 Minutes
San Diego Comic Con was this month, and appearing on the floor were the three trolls from The Hobbit which many people took photos of. I thought that might be fun to paint, so I had a go at it. For the fun of experimentation I used very thick paint (fake, in ArtRage, obviously) and a low load. The result isn't that great as just as I was getting into it something came up and I had to leave it and then I didn't get back to it in a timely manner. But I also grabbed this:
I realized that I could "rewind" the painting by using undo because ArtRage seems to have an infinite number of undo steps per session. I took the chance to do what I've rarely done before and grabbed some work in progress shots of a speedpaint. It's odd that these were saved after the fact, but nevertheless they give a little insight into my speedpainting process (Which I think varies a bit every time). I did this for the other paints this month too.
Time Taken: 45 Minutes
I guess I've had this flagged for painting for ages. It's based on Stock by the intriguingly named pretentioustwat on Deviantart. I was originally going to paint the whole thing, but after viewing it full size (which naturally didn't fit on the screen) I thought just this crop of it might work too. I also decided (experimenting again) to make dark blue the darkest it could go, rather than black. I quite like the result.
Which is not to say its as good as I would have liked. I messed up her hands something fierce, but I suppose it's good enough. 15 Minutes in I almost gave up on it as obviously no good could come of it, but I'm glad I kept on. Interestingly it was only when it was finished that I could take a step back and decide the lack of black (or at least near black) had worked. Until then I was convinced it would be far too obvious, but in the end result I don't think it is until you really take a good look at it.
Time Taken: 35 Minutes
This is by far my favorite paint of the month. It's far from perfect, but it has that loose look I really liked about the portrait of the man from the last speedpaint post, but with a more finished feel. It's loosely based on this photo, though I have no idea where that picture originates from unfortunately.
As an experiment I saved the undo series as a video and uploaded it. You don't get to see the actual settings used or the occasional mistakes I made (since they were undone during the process and therefor not recorded), but it's a lot less stressful than doing it real time (as I've done before).
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