Usually I manage to cram in some video game playing, some TV watching, some sketching and some reading into an average evening. Maybe not all of those things in one evening, but averaged across the week; with some speedpainting on the weekends. Right now this is not the case. I've played for 6 hours since the middle of July, I've managed an hour of TV a night (tops), I've spent a fortnight reading the same book (I usually finish them in 3 days) and this month so far I've done a bare two pages of sketching and not done a speedpaint for two weeks.
Those little things eat up a colossal amount of time I guess. Anyway, Onto the baby!
And there we go. You probably want some backstory and progress pictures. Or if you don't want them you at least expect them by now. You will not be left disappointed.
So a friend from work (We'll call him Mr. Boyn) approaches me ages ago and asks if I'll paint his son for him. Sure, why not, I'm on a roll with this whole commission thing anyway, right? Well, then things got busy and I forgot he'd asked. I even decided not to take any more commissions and posted about it here. The next day he said "does that include mine?" and I was all "of course not," because that wouldn't be very fair since my forgetting wasn't his fault. Contracts signed, reference picture handed over, start painting in time for his Son's first birthday (the painting is actually for his wife though).
The initial sketch bears only a passing resemblance to his son because I was planning on painting over it, so I just needed the basic location and scale of his features (I got the eyes very wrong, more on that in a sec). I used a grid, but by "grid" I mean "crosshair", you can see it in the picture. Not great for extreme accuracy, but it did the job in this case.
Then I started painting, and pretty quickly realised I was painting too dark. You can see the bottom two pics getting lighter as I over paint it (I cheated for his T-shirt and ear though and just adjusted the levels. I'll try and live with my guilt).
It was around this point that I also realised I'd made his eyes too small, resulting him looking sort of piggish, and rather sinister. First I opened them up a bit, and then just repainted them larger, and continued to tweak them a few times until he looked happy and cute (as they are int he reference). In the bottom right image I've also tweaked the lighting on his cheek and blocked in his mouth. Mr. Boyn approved of the progress.
You'll note that the images get lighter as we go along. This is because every time I left it and came back I'd be amazed at how dark I'd painted it last time and then lighten it up a bit. The exception is his pupils which I painted too light in the top left image and then had to darken a little. Then I moved onto his T-shirt in the top right.
His actual shirt had snoopy on it, and I thought it would be nice to remove snoopy and leave him with a classy white. I wish I'd kept snoopy as keeping him wouldn't have been that hard and I could have hidden a lot of the wrinkles in the black parts. I'm kidding, but painting the T-shirt plain white was a lot harder than I expected, especially as I was leaving details out.
Bottom left I realised his mouth was a little wrong and his nose to small so I fixed them. You can barely tell can you? It was a little more noticeable full size so I think it was worth fixing. I then went back and finished his T-Shirt and added his shorts and hair (which went more smootly than I was expecting). Originally I was just going to leave the bottom black as his shorts were so dark, but once I finished his shirt it became obvious that I would need to add them. They weren't in the sketch though, so I just freestyled it. They came out quite well given they took less time than any other element in the painting.
After that it was just a case of blending the background colours, tweaking the shadows, painting his right arm (our left) and adding some knitted texture to the blue blanked to his left (our right). Oh, and painting his ear, which I almost forgot about so it was just sitting there unfinished almost until the last minute.
I changed very little from the original photo during painting. I mentioned I removed snoopy, and the only other major changes were changing the multiple shades of the blanket to flat blue, and increasing the amount of bounce light from it onto Boyn Jr. I think it went extremely smoothly overall, and while I'm not 100% satisfied (am I ever) it's a good likeness and he doesn't look creepy, which is what can easily happen in paintings of young children in my experience. For the record I was lucky in the photo I was given to begin with - their son is honestly adorable.
Were they happy with the result? I'm guessing yes as Mrs. Boyn has been quoted as being "speechless". I'm going to assume that means she liked it, rather than she couldn't think of anything nasty enough to say about it :)
No reference image for you (I forgot to ask permission) and no animated gif this time either as I didn't save all that many revisions for this one (They're almost all shown above). So, apologies for that, but I'm sure you'll live.
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