A Pirate's Life

Yeah, I missed a couple of weekends and haven't sorted out the sketching from two months ago yet, but I was busy. I'm here now, and ready to show one of the things I've been busy with. It's the first really finished digital piece I think I've done since November, and it took a while. I have some other stuff coming up I'll briefly mention first though.
I was working on a cover for Book 4 of Phil's TARDIS Eruditorum series, but we've both agreed it would be better suited for book 5, so I need to come up with other ideas, while still working on the #5 cover (it's a reasonably big job). I've also got this months sketches to scan in, and then I have to decide if it's a separate post from the previous two months or not (probably not, I didn't do all that much), and another speedpaint post is almost ready (I just want to do one more speedpaint for it).
Saints Row IV is out next month (probably this month by the time I post this, which means I should probably do a post about my work on the previous one before it's irrelevant. Beyond that I'm almost done with another painting class, so I'll be posting the results of that too. Remember the last one and set expectations accordingly. But now, on with this post...

You can click that to get a rather large version.  Hopefully your browser can do a half decent job of re-scaling it to fit your window.  You can enlarge the rest of the images in this post as well if you want a better look, though none of them are this large.

The story behind this one isn't terribly involved.  It's based on this stock photograph from Dingelientje-stock on DeviantArt and has been in my Favorites collection there for quite a while.  In the usual course of things I would probably have forgotten about it unless I stumbled across it while browsing my Favorites, which I do on occasion, but this one just kept popping up for some reason.  Every time I saw it I thought 'that would make a good painting' and then I'd move on.  Finally, when I was in a mood to actually do a portrait I stumbled across it again and thought 'Of course, that one!' and got started.  Really I just liked the puppy peeking out of her shirt, and in fact the initial name for this one was just Puppy Shoulder.

So I actually spent a little time sketching the layout for this one.  Not enough time apparently as it's still way off (sometimes I get it almost perfect, other times I'm way off - this is somewhere in between), but somewhere between 40 minutes and an hour.  The image on the left here is simply a quick sketch to get the very rough composition, taking about a minute, and then I filled in the detail that you can see on the right over the remaining time.

This is the blocking in process.  It's not supposed to be particularly pretty, and it really isn't.  Mostly it's just getting the rough masses and areas of colour blocked out.  Unlike my usual technique, where I keep the line art on a layer above the painting for constant reference, this time I kept it below and painted right over it (as I would with real paint), trusting the blocked image as a guide. I  didn't go quite dark enough with the shadows and her hair is the wrong colour here, but it was more important to me to identify that there at least was a shadow, and get the rough shape of her hair - the rest could be tweaked on the next pass.

Which was this one.  Still a little rough, but you can see I'm smoothing out the transitions and adding detail to her features as well as getting her hair the right color.  There's about 90 minutes or so between each of these stages, and while I would do further passes on most of the image her ear pretty much stayed at this stage all the way to the end.  Likewise I didn't really adjust the shirt after this except to add the stripes.

I had a little panic attack at around the point I finished the image on the right.  I have one at some point in any work I do that takes more than a couple of hours.  I start doubting the picture and wondering if I've just wasted my time.  Usually I reach the conclusion that even if the end result is terrible, the time will only have been wasted if I don't finish it or give it my all, and then I'll get back to it.

You can see the stripes here.  I did cheat a little with the stripes, because rather than spend the effort of making them darker as they went further into the shadow I just painted them on another layer and then used ArtRage's Multiply Blending mode to do all the hard work for me.  I did go in and tweak the result once I'd flattened the image, but still.  Despite the 'cheat' adding the stripes still took over an hour - I could have done a speedpaint in that time ;)

No cheating for her headband though, except with real paint I probably would have needed t paint the scarf white, darken the shadows, and then paint the black over it, while here I could just paint the white and grey straight over the black.  I didn't notice until this point, but firstly I realised the scarf had Skulls and Crossbones on it, and then I noticed that the skulls had hearts for eyes, which is pretty awesome.  I was tempted to not bother doing that in the painting, because who'd notice?  But then I decided it would be a really nice detail and made sure I matched it as best I could. This was also the point I decided to change the title to A Pirate's Life (Originally it was going to be A Pirate's Love, but was she the love? Or the pirate in love? And would my wife get the wrong idea?  Life it is then!).

The final panel here may look the same as the preceding one at first glance, but her hair has had an additional pass along the top and side.

These three may look almost identical except for her tattoo, but I made a number of tweaks to her face, including smoothing some of the shading, improving her eyes, changing her eyebrows, tweaking her nose, adding detail to her lips, and adjusting her cheeks.  Hard to see at this size, but fairly obvious at the size I was painting.  Those changes may be more visible in the GIF below.

The tattoo itself I'd put off until the end as I thought it would be nightmarish to do.  Turned out that other than being a little time consuming (The line art for the flowers took about an hour, and the rest about the same) it wasn't too bad, and actually quite relaxing.

This is just an image from the end of each of the 4 main passes at the painting, to give a better look at the progression.

And this is a GIF of the painting stages at the end of each session I worked on it (mostly between 1 and 2 hours a time).  20 odd hours reduced to a few seconds...

Finally, just for a bit of fun I took the painting and ran it through some adjustments and filters in Photoshop in order to change the mood.  I think the left one looks more romantic as a result, while the right one looks more dramatic and candle lit, but the real one is the one at the top there.  Maybe I'll paint something candle lit looking next... Or not.