More to life than simply Speedpainting

It's not very often you get to start a post by paraphrasing Ghandi, so I think when you get the chance you should go for it, don't you. This month has been a little sparse on posts as you may have noticed. Generally this happens when I get busy elsewhere, and I'm plenty busy right now. Tomorrow I start a 6 week painting class on Wednesday evenings. It worked out as expensive, but I feel it will work out cheaper in the long run (and faster) than pulling out some paints every six months and grimacing at the results. it may turn out I just suck and the whole thing will be a disaster, but at least I'll know, and so will you as of course I'll post the resulting detritus here.

As well as that I've been working on a commission (the one I said I'd be a fool to turn down). It's actually finished, completed last night, but I can't post it for a while (which is something you should be used to with the commissions by now). The good news is that I'm sketching a lot more than I was last month, although quite a bit of that is for the Open Art Group (Which you get to see anyway). Two of this month's speedpaints are sort of for the same, so I suppose I should get on and show them.

Time Taken: 45 Minutes
I wanted to work on fabric and cloth a little (not a huge amount - I'll be focusing on it at some point when my anatomy is better) so I painted this flag at work. It's my flag, you get bonus points if you recognise it. That blurry thing in the foreground is my monitor, which you can't see from this angle any more as I have a new one. Actually I can't see the flag either now because it's a larger monitor.

Time Taken: 75 Minutes
This one is for Open Art Group. The focus was Self Portraits (you may have guessed). I've posted a few self-portraits before, but this one is peculiar in that I was painting from life, using a small mirror propped against my monitor. It looks like me I guess, so I'll call it a win. You may note a few of these go over the hour I usually reserve for speedpaints. That's just how it's been going of late - they're still under two hours which I think is my official cut-off time for speedpainting these days.

Oh, and there's a step by step, just because.

Time Taken: 100 minutes
I don't know why this one took so long, but I'm quite pleased with how the silk turned out. It actually started as a profile study, but then I got into painting the fabric instead of her face. I quite like it, though I should have left her hair as an outline too, I think it looked better that way. Profiles of faces are a focus of late by the way, due to Open Art Group, though it was this one that made me decide I should work on them.

Taken from a Stock photo by the wonderful charligal-stock

Time Taken: 110 Minutes
Another profile, this time of Matt Smith as the Doctor from Doctor Who (copyright and trademark BBC), from the episode Asylum of the Daleks. It's not the best likeness, but it's rather better than the last speedpaint I did of him ;) My friend says his hair's too small, my brother says he looks to old - they're probably both right. Amusingly I think I spent more time on the background than I did on the Doctor. Clouds are hard!

Time Taken: 100 Minutes
Another paint taken from a Sci-Fi still, this time from Pitch Black. That's supposed to be Riddick in Cryo at the beginning. Looks nothing like Vin Diesel unfortunately. At one point it looked a lot more like him, but his head was at a peculiar angle. I fixed the angle but lost the likeness. C'est la vie.

Time Taken: 30 Minutes
Last one, real quick, this was just something quick and reference-less I did in Photoshop in an effort to reacquaint myself with its brushes. Might do more in it, might do less, but this was the result regardless. Annoyingly she looked a lot better earlier on, but there was next to no contrast, I increased the contrast and messed it up a bit as a result. Getting to be a running theme...

That's your lot, off you go.