12 Squared

You may recall a few months ago I entered an Artrage competition on Deviantart.  I didn't win, and wasn't terribly happy with the entry anyway.  Well, I entered one after that with a picture of our cat Cameron (we had two, but the other one, Ferris, ran away and we've not heard anything of him in months), and then I got too busy to enter.

Last month I was still busy, but I wanted to paint something fairly finished before I went crazy, so I made some time, picked a picture of Peter Capaldi as The Doctor to paint, and was all set to go when I saw the latest Artrage contest was for "grids." One quick, and minor, rethink later I was all set to go.  You can see the result I entered below.

And there we have it.  Catch you next time!

Oh, all right, for the three of you that bother to read them (Hi to Ken in Guilford!), here's the step by step.  Click the images to enlarge as usual.

First of all, I'm nowhere near good enough to paint this off the cuff, so I needed some references.  I took the original photograph, which was a publicity still for the Doctor Who episode "Listen" and ran it through a couple of Photoshop filters to come up with three references: The cropped original, a 'cutout' version and a 'mosaic' one.  With that done, off! To Artrage.

First things first, I decided to shift the cool blues of the reference to a nice warm brown, but I kept the blues in the shadows.  I'd completely forgotten, but I'd used almost this exact combination before.  Guess I need to either work on my originality or embrace the Brown N' Blue.  

Anyway, I went with that and started roughing in the mosaic version of the picture.  Now, because the contest was about grids, and because Artrage just introduced a grid feature for the first time (hence the contest), I thought I should probably use one.  Well, two, at different sizes, for where I wanted to break up the larger squares into smaller blocks.  I used the unfiltered reference to guestimate what colours those smaller squares though be.  Despite the feature being available I didn't use 'Snap to Grid', rather I just filled in the grid squares one at a time.  It gives it a rougher look that I quite like.

Oh, by the way, the first image is a PNG because JPEG mangles some of the colours, as you can see particularly well in the top right of the left image above.  On the right is a WIP I posted to facebook (I rarely do that), wondering if anyone could tell who it was.  My friend Tommy got it on the first try, so that was promising.

So here I've gone ahead and started painting the more traditional looking bit.  Started with his eye of course, because where else would you start a portrait of Peter Capaldi?  I made a minor change to the location of his eyeball so it was looking more directly at the viewer with the new composition.  Also, I wasn't actually using the grids at this point except to occasionally to turn them on to check proportions and things.  They're fine for layout, but I found them distracting for actually painting.  

I did use the grids extensively for the yellow side of the face.  It's not exactly the same as the cutout version; I was trying to stick to the grid points for a more graphic look where the Photoshopped reference was more curved.  That was probably the easiest bit of the whole painting, and surprisingly fun given that it was basically join the dots.

At first glance you might not notice the difference between these three pictures.  If I'm right then you're looking at the eye in each one, at least to begin with.  I chose the placement of that eye quite carefully for that very reason, so I hope it works.  

Anyway, here I'm just painting the rest of his face and nose as well as filling in some more mosaic bits in the yellow area.  If you look at his cheek you'll see I tried to introduce a fairly sharp shade change there based on the location of the similar in the Cutout version.  In reality the transition there is a lot smoother, but I wanted to match the shape on the other side.  I do that for a lot of the shadow on that side, but that's the most obvious case (and especially right under his eye on the left of the painting).  I also did some more work on his shirt to make it marginally more obvious as to what it was.

Not much to say here - working on his forehead and blocking in his hair (literally in this case), extrapolating from the 'clean' and 'mosaic' refs again.  I was originally going to leave it as just squares, but the smaller and more contrasting ones there were pulling away from the eye, so I started to soften it and then thought "Damn, I just need to paint the hair don't I?"  I hate painting hair.

And these are the finishing touches.  Polishing up the hair, blocking out over his right temple (less distracting there I feel, though I may have still added too much contrast), and adding to the blocky background and cleaning it up.  I had a bright blue square through all of this (I used it for the base of all the other blues originally, and then just left it there), and since it wasn't too distracting, but still stood out from the rest, I decided to sign it there.  

And that was really all there was to it.  As a result of this I discovered a friend of mine knows Peter Capaldi (mind-blown), but as far as I know he hasn't shown him this image (I'm sure Capaldi has to swim through his pile of adoring fan-art to get out of bed in the morning, and the rest of the fan-mail to reach his cocoa-pops, so he doesn't need me adding to it).

So, keep your eyes peeled on Tuesday as I'll hopefully have another picture up - and its one of the more ambitious pieces I've ever done.  It's also Doctor Who related, because that seems to be a running theme through some of these posts, don't you think?


Oh... I won the competition by the way.