It's been a while since I made one of these posts, mostly because I thought I was done with them. If you want to read the preceding six you can go here and work from the bottom up. If you'd rather skip six bland posts from history the basic premiss was this: ask for people on Facebook to volunteer for me to paint their picture. I got to choose the picture and the theme (if any), and four people, randomly chosen, would get a full best of my ability painting, and some of the others would get something too if I could be bothered. Of the people that signed up I ended up painting seven of them, and it was quite fun.
This year (two years on) I decided to do it again. Same message on facebook, and twice the number of people signed up. Again the pictures were randomly chosen, although there were some surprising coincidences in the people who ended up getting picked. This time I let people pick their own photos for me to do, and all of them will be painted with a more speedpaint mentality than before because, y'know, free work? I'll get to the coincidences later, but here's the first of the paintings, which I did a few weeks ago.
And there you have it. As usual there will now be a step by step breakdown of the picture, but even though this was done with a speedpaint mentality I'll still break down individual steps a little because this took 5 hours. Yes, speedpaints are usually an hour or two, but they're also a lot smaller than this as these are intended for potential printing, and speedpaints usually aren't, though they can print surprisingly well (The big images here are reduced in size).
You may note that I didn't paint the person who signed up on Facebook. Coincidence number one - none of the people picked submitted their own photos to be chosen. Two picked pictures of their children, of which this is one. The other two picked a spouse and a parent.
Okay, so I'm presented with a photo of a child I don't personally know, and I need to paint them fairly quickly. Where to begin? Same place as always - at the beginning.
Here's the initial sketch. At first glance this probably doesn't look too different to the final layout.You'd be right. Other than some tweaks to the location of his features (mainly his upper lip and left eye) this is the same as the final image. I did do some measurements off the original image, but the majority is just eyeballed. Again, this is very much a speedpainting mentality, and as usual it bit me on the behind later on.
The only other thing of note here was that I cropped some of the photo down for the paintings composition. While it was a lovely photograph it was the child's face and his action of holding up his hand that I liked, and thus it became the focus. I'm not sure if his hand is up because he's waving, or to show what's stuck to his glove. Ultimately it was an uncertainty I liked, and tried to capture that in my rendition.
These show the early development of his face and the overall colour scheme (click to enlarge of course). I realised pretty early on that I had his eyes a bit small, but I wasn't sure enough to fix them at this point. I thought that maybe after I'd fleshed out some of the rest of his face it would turn out I was wrong and his eyes would be the right size after all. Wrong of course, but one can dream.
Here's the picture going through a transitional period. I had begun to flesh out the rest of the image - specifically his hat and hand, as well as tightening up some of the elements of his face. Here I'd finally realised for certain that his eyes were too small and I'd started to work on widening the right one as non-destructively as I could.
Which I failed at and ended up just repainting it. I also realised that his left eye was not only two small, but too low and so that got repainted higher, and his other features also received some tweaking, with his nose getting wider, and his lower lip getting thicker. Obviously his coat and hands received quite a bit of work here too, though his actual hat, a fairly large part of the image, was basically done in one pass and then never touched again.
After that last I did a little more tweaking of the lighting around and on his face, mostly trying to capture some of the bounce of the sun from the orange lining of his hat back onto his face. You may note that this has lightened his eye somewhat. I also reddened his nose to make his face look colder, it's just a touch, but it goes a long way.
I got a commission shortly after finishing this, so I've not started on any of the others yet, but they'll be along sooner or later (I might cover another coincidence when I write that one up). The commission I can hopefully cover this weekend (I had meant to post this last week, and had most of it written. Somehow got sidetracked from finishing until now).
No comments:
Post a Comment