Less Haste, More Speed

Well, hopefully this is the start of a turn around, as it's only been a week since I last posted. With three speedpaints done then; not enough to show, and seven to show today that's four paintings in a week!  OK, it's actually not since I found one of them down the side of the virtual couch, but still.

Basically last weeks post showed me that I'd been neglecting things far in excess of the amount of other things I had to do, especially for speedpainting.  Usually I wait until I see something I want to paint, and then think "I should paint that."  Time allowing I do so.

Recently though there's been a disconnect between when I see the thing, and when I have time to paint, and with other things crowding my brain I've forgotten about the likely image, or my mood has changed and it doesn't appeal any more.  So now I'm going to make a more concerted effort to stack up likely candidates separately from the rest of my references, so they're easier to go through when I want to paint something quick.

Anyway, you don't care about any of that, you just want to see pictures, right?

Time Taken: 65 minutes
Software: ArtRage 4

After all I just said about keeping references around, here's a painting I did without any.  I realised it had been a while since I'd really thought about the form of the skull - which is of course an enormously useful thing to know when doing portraits - so I thought I should paint one. This is the best skull profile with headphones and a rose I can currently do in 65 minutes.  Don't like the rose?  Here it is again with the rose removed, because it was on a separate layer and my friend Laura said she'd like it more without.  Yay for layers!

So there you go - no references (which is why the teeth are way off - I never really learned teeth in any detail), just me poking at my graphics tablet for an hour in ArtRage.

Nothing amazing to see in a step by step either (I'm doing more of these - it's as much for me to remember how I approached things in future as it is for you to see how I did it now).  The only real thing of note is that I quickly tweaked the shape of the skull so it wasn't as elongated, and I remembered that unless you have an unusually huge jaw it doesn't angle backwards like that - so I'd fixed it in the 4th image here.

I don't recall why I pointed the rose at the back of the head instead of the front - I suspect I didn't think about it at all.  Yeah, it's cliched, but I wanted a bit of stronger colour and something I could paint fairly recognisably with no reference - so rose it was.

Time Taken: 60 minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on this

This, to me, is a good example of how rusty I am doing these things.  Time was when something like this might have taken me half the time; though I think the end result may have been weaker.  Even so, it's an OK piece I guess, despite not really capturing what I liked about the original Photograph, which was it's grainy old documentary look.

Here's the step-by-step (I've chopped off the top, which didn't change much), where I've not really gone for block shapes beyond that of her hair, and instead I've just sort of placed slight blob shapes that eventually coalesce into the more recognisable forms.  It still amazes me how little is needed for the brain to process that something is a face, even if it's not a specific one - that second image explains essentially everything that's going to come  by the end in terms of the position and basic form of her face and hair, while leaving the rest of her body utterly ambiguous - even though I stick to that same basic layout for it right to the end.

Swift Sugar has a bunch of photos in this style; I'm almost certain I'll be returning to them for another painting at some point in order to get closer to what's appealing about them.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4.5
Based on one of these (I can't link to the exact one, but it's in there)

I'm not a fan of this one.  There are aspects of it I'm quite pleased with, but overall I think it's mostly just a blobby mess.  I usually do portraits, and I like doing portraits, but occasionally I like to try something else, and this urban, near post apocalyptic scene appealed to me.  I think I could have done a pretty good job of it if I'd taken a lot longer, but as it is it's a long way from good.

I think the failings come early too.  for something like this to be effective you should be able to squinch your eyes and have the tonal range still make sense, which helps make up for slightly uneven edges and slightly skewed perspective when you get that initial read, but here it really doesn't.  I do quite like some of the worn brick, and the rubble and vegetation in the foreground reads quite well as being in shadow, but overall I think I need to spend more time on layout and getting values right if I'm going to try something like this again (and probably I will).  This was my first piece done with ArtRage 4.5 too, where they've introduced a grid feature.  In this case I might have been wise to use it.

Time Taken: 20 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4.5

I have terrible difficulty when painting with no references.  I know guys who can do it, who only use references for specific things, rather than general layouts, and I am in awe of them.  this is what happens when I just go for it.  I dare say that with years of practice I might get half decent at doing this, but for now you end up with scribbled messes like this one (and, more rarely, ones like the skull up top).

I like some of the ideas in here (Topless while not showing anything, the underwear blending into the bed and so on), but it didn't capture much of what I was actually aiming to achieve.  Maybe I'll have another crack at it one day with more planning, but not as a speedpaint - just off the cuff, this one is a failure.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4.5
Based on this and this

Speaking of the grid feature, as I did before, I used it a little for this one.  I've long had issues with painting things in perspective, and I've gone into some of the reasons for that before, so for this one I divided the image using a 2x2 grid; basically a crosshair.  This was after I'd already taken the original and cropped and rotated it into this composition to work from, and decided I was going to try and match the less extreme palette of the second picture more than the original.

So the crosshair helped me with the layout a bit, without being enough of a grid that I was trying to match every little thing and slowing to a crawl as a result (and this one took far longer than it should have to begin with).  This one was also one I almost gave up on, right before the last image of the top row in the sequence.  That was 45 minutes in, and at that point  the picture is usually starting to come together, and this time I just didn't feel that it was.  So I decided to give it 10 minutes more, and if it was still dreadful I'd give up on it.  The next image in the sequence was about 10 minutes later, and it had improved enough that I decided to carry on. Quite glad I did - I'm fairly happy with the end result despite it taking an additional hour.

Time Taken: 55 Minutes
Software: Art Rage 4.5
Based on this and this

This is an odd one.  I'm not terribly happy with it - it's okay, but to my eyes not exceptionally good or anything.  So it's amusing to me that's it's been one of my most popular images for a while in places I've shown it.  Clearly I am a terrible judge of my own work.

It does mean I'll be doing something along these lines as a finished piece eventually though, because while I'm not happy with the end result it was a lot of fun to paint.  It came about because I really liked both of the source images, and couldn't decide between them, so I thought "why not have both", which has strangle turned out to be the phrase of the week.  Anyway, it was fun to blend two things together during a speedpaint.

Here's the progression, and for a change I'm handling it like a 'real' artist, blocking in the basic shapes, then the major lighting forms, and then building up on top of that.  My personal favourite stage here was the first on the bottom left, where I'd just roughed in her hair, I just like how she looked at that point.  Once I'd introduced the tule behind her, which really doesn't read as such, it just didn't feel as solid to me.

Anyway, the central two images at the bottom do have some differences, despite that not being the case at first glance.  I cleaned up her neck a little, and did some fairly major remodelling of her nose  and facial structure, as well as increasing the amount of eye makeup.

Finally I tried using some very different settings for the oil brush tool when approaching her hair (stiff brush, low pressure), and threw in some red highlights to bring some of the drama of her makeup into her hair.  Someone commented that she looked like Harley Quinn from Batman; maybe that's why this one has been quite popular.

Time Taken: 5 Minutes
Software: Photoshop CC

This is the one I lost down the back of the sofa.  I did it months ago, not really as a speedpaint, but more as a test of a technique, and then I forgot about it.  Essentially I was trying to come up with a quick and easy method of painting Kirby Krackle, and this was my solution.  It's quite a nice technique for other things too, and is actually very simple - you can see the crackle as you paint, rather than having to run a bunch of filters after the fact.  While  prepping the following image was in fact the first time I'd ever seen the images look like that, as I'd painted the above one with all the layers in place.

So this is less a step by step and more of a 'how did I do that?' (again, as much for my future reference as your interest).  For those curious it's four stacked Photoshop layers  The bottom layer (on the left) is the actual painting, the next layer is the rough pattern to be seen in the krackle, with fairly low opacity to let the painting layer come through (in this case it was a noise layer with the Reticulation filter run on it, and a 25% opacity).  On top of this was a threshold layer, to give it the hard contrasting dots look.  Finally I threw in a red multiplied layer to give it the slightly garish look of Kirby's energy or nebula renderings.

Working that out took a while, but this particular use of it took only 5 minutes.  Its not a great picture, but I found it a lot of fun to play around with.





(As a by the by, Blogger has been having a lot of technical issues today, making writing this post a lot more arduous than it usually is.  No matter to you, but it sure was to me)