I still haven't compiled all the sketches from October to December to show, and now of course I have January's to do, and then February's in a couple of weeks. I'll get to it, and probably not all in one post either, but this weekend I'm working on another painting (digital), and then there's another facebook portrait to do, and I want to get a traditional piece done and work on my perspective skills and speedpaints too, so as you can imagine, things are a little cramped for time right now. Also, TV show season, not helping...
Anyway, on with today's performance.
And there we go. If you don't know them then we shall call them D and J. Partly to maintain anonymity, but mostly because it mean's less typing.
So J (the man) came to me in mid January and asked if I could paint a version of his favourite photo of them as a couple for Valentine's Day. I agreed, and having known him for a few years I was already familiar with the photo. You can't see the photo, but there will a comparison of a sort as we go along. It took a little while for him to get the picture to me, but when he did I got started.
First of all I needed to sketch out the image. For a change I decided to measure it really, really carefully. I could have used a grid I guess, but since I needed to make some compositional changes there would have been multiple grids to work from, so measuring worked almost as well. But less accurate. Despite all my care I still muffed a few key points, mostly on J, as in the photo his head was leaning forward at an angle, and I didn't do a great job of realigning it. His eye is a bit high, his mouth a bit narrow and his right side (left of the image) is the wrong shape. I rechecked scales and positions occasionally as I went along, and fixed most of them, as well as his chin (this was accurate to the photo, but since his chin was tucked in the photo the skin on the side was being pushed out a little making his chin look smaller. He pointed this out to me much later and I felt very foolish for not noticing it). Anyway, we'll come back to all that later, but let's get on with the painting for now with a note that I also thought it would be a great idea to paint them to one side of the painting. J pointed out I was an idiot (my word, not his), so I repositioned them to the middle later on.
So a very rough colour pass here, and the beginning of blocking out J's tones. After this I didn't touch it for a while because I got really sick for a few days, but you can see I was trying to make some changes to the colour of the photo. Oh, wait, you can't because I'm not showing you the photo.
You can see that there's less variation between the average flesh tones in mine - an effort to unify the painting. My colours are also pinker in an effort to warm the original up as it felt quite cold to me personally, and I wanted it to have a warm and inviting feel instead. The bottom right comparison is showing the difference between the darkest tones on the photo and painting - both are off the shirt. Despite the desire for warm tones I also wanted some colour compliment in there, and this was my solution - making the shadows a more complimentary shade. Yes, that blue really is the darkest the painting gets (or as close as the compression will show). Black tends to deaden things a bit, though it's very usefull sometimes it wasn't conducive to the warm and inviting tone I wanted, so I went with blue instead. I have to say I'm actually surprised at how light that blue is now I'm seeing it next to the original black - It never felt that light when I was painting. One of those illusions I've written of before.
Aaaanyway, the background in the original was also near black, so I've bumped it up to a nice brown here.
At this point I'm in the middle of being sick for part of it, and almost over being sick for the rest. This likely explains the vast differences in how I blocked out J and D here (I did J while sick and while getting sick, D was done when I was basically recovered). Not much else to say, which hopefully will be the case for the rest as there's a way to go yet.
Oh look, that was quick, her face is finished. It really did seem to go very quickly in fact, I got her painted in a few hours, and then barely touched her face until at the very last minute I added some extra highlights. J never asked for any changes either. If only all paintings could be that easy! The only major revision from the block-in was her left eye, which needed moving, and the expansion of her right cheekbone (I habitually make them too small - need to work on that). For some reason her nose is still my favourite part of the painting.
Then I moved onto J. His hair looks terrible here, like a small sideways mohawk, but I knew I'd get to it eventually. First up I needed to move his eye. I was a little lazy, and instead of repainting it I just grabbed it and rotated it with a tool and painted over the cracks. Can't do that easily with real paint, more's the pity. Also repainted his jawline and straightened his nose along with starting to fill out his other eye and mouth. No cheating there, just painting.
This was actually a few days later, but nothing terribly exciting happened between the two steps. I wasn't happy with the stubble on his temple, but figured I'd revisit it. His ear is just blocked in at this point, and his chin will change, but otherwise his actual face is finished at this point. One stage I missed was a change to his upper lip either side of the philtrum - it was quite deeply shadowed in the original photo (probably because his head was dipped), so J asked me to lighten it up a bit. This is after I did that, so there are no public records of J's dark lip.
Incidentally, this got me wondering what that top lip bit is actually called - I mean it's clearly distinct from the actual lips that women put lipstick on, and men can't grow moustaches on, but as far as I know that part of the body is just called the Top Lip (with a matching 'what's it called?' under the lower lip, also called a 'bottom lip'). The division between the upper lip, and the top lip (see? Confusing!) is usually called a Cupid's Bow, but is also called a Turbucle (I looked that up). It's most odd - especially as almost every bit of the nose has a name (do you know what an Ala is? 'cause I do - It's the bulgy flared bit around your nostrils).
So if anyone knows what the bit of the top lip that grows hair is technically called let me know in the comments below. I did search for it, but all I got was Philtrum, which is the bit in the middle. Anyway, moving on...
So J got back to me and asked that I update his hair. Not fix the bit I wasn't happy with, but update it to the style he currently has. By has I mean hasn't, since he shaves most of it now, leaving a small amount of stubble on the sides. Fair enough, especially since I wasn't happy with his hair anyway. The only difficulty here was that J has a prominent Coronal Suture (I looked that up too - it's the ridge where the front of your skull meets the back at the top). Getting that right without making it look like a weird mutation (it's very common) was a little tricky without exact lighting reference, but I think I got it close enough.
I also shifted his chin, as J noted that it was in the wrong place. Again this was me taking the original photo too literally and not taking into account the changes in the anatomy stemming from him moving his head. Surprisingly easy to fix, and made a huge difference. I also tweaked the line of his face for about the 400th time, but since what I changed is now behind his chin you can't see it. His ear is also finished here, and while my favourite bit of the painting is D's nose, J's ear is probably the bit I did the best job of. Just the right amount of red shift. Very pleased with that.
D's hair came next - and this is really here to show that I had to paint it twice, because this first attempt was awful. Part of the issue was my rushing it, which ended up taking longer than when I did it properly the second time. The other issue, compounded by the rushing, was that the range of colours I could use before her hair started to look too purple or too orange was very very narrow.
Most of it's shifted very slightly into the purple in the finished one - brown being dark desaturated orange, over the top of the blue I was using for black - Halfway between orange and blue is purplish red. Looks brown doesn't it? Yay, illusions! But this meant that too shifted in one direction looked orange, and in the other direction too purple, and too saturated became red. You can see some of that explosion of purple and orange here (I kept the saturation low enough to more or less avoid red). Anyway, I didn't like it so I repainted it properly. Took less time and ended up looking far better. Typical.
After that Jay asked me to expand the sides a bit to give the option of fitting more frames. That wasn't too difficult since the background was just cloudy looking sky. I also signed it, but unlike the way I usually do it I painted a block and cut the signature out of it. Why? Because doing it the other way oddly made it stand out more unless I made it a shade or colour that was barely visible - this way the eye is less drawn to it, but it's perfectly visible if you want to see it. I quite like how it looks, and I guess that means I now have three ways I can sign my pictures; whichever best suits the given picture itself.
So then J went and got it printed for Valentine's Day. He brought it to show me the printed result before framing it. I was expecting a 12x14 image or something, but this was more like 4 or 5 feet across! Terrifying thinking of my artwork that big - every flaw right there, bigger than life. Looked okay though, so that was good - I just really hope his wife liked it (not spoken to him since Friday), because you can hide a small picture you don't like on a shelf - but there's nowhere to hide a 5ft picture except in the garage facing the wall...
Okay, and finally, here's a closeup of the painting at the size I painted it (The linked one at the top is only about half size. Oh look, it's the ear - I was quite pleased with that bit), and below is the animated gif of all the stages I saved at. Keep an eye on that top lip, whatever it's called. I moved the first few frames over so there's not a big jump when they get repositioned, and the final extended background isn't shown either - but you can deal with it, right?
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