All the speed, none of the finesse

Well, it's been a heck of a month, and somewhat exhausting.  I'll spare you all the little details, but they are much the same as ever, with the addition of three bereavements.  Again, I'll not go into details, this being more a reminder to my future self as to what I was doing when they left us than any seeking of sympathy.

In other areas things have been going better.  I did a portrait that I can't show you for some time (for reasons murky and unfathomable - I don't really understand them myself), and managed, with a bit of modification, to keep up with my New Years resolution.

This modification was simply to change the goal from one speedpaint a week to the equivalent of four speedpaints a month.  This has the advantage of requiring fewer speedpaints (3 less, since I'd already excluded the first week of the year), and also meaning that if any were missed I could catch up on them at another time, something I have had to do, somehow managing to miss one in January I made up for in March.

All of which is to say, there's a bumper fun packed* collection Speedpaints to follow.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: This image, original photographer unknown.

For this following bunch of speedpaints there's a reasonable amount of experimentation with the types of brushes and settings I'm using in the software.  In this instance I was experimenting with wet on wet oils - something I've done on occasion, but never, to my recollection, on a more graphical scene.  The original photograph is of Torino Italy, and was found, as many of my subjects are, on Pinterest.  Sadly I've not been able to track down the original photographer to credit them properly, so if you know, mention it in the comments below.

As you can see, the majority of it was just building up details over time.  The majority of the composition was worked out in the second image here, with much of the colour being introduced in the third.  All that remained was adding the details and nailing down the minor red and green hues dotted around.

Time Taken: 55 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based On: The first image of Armstrong under the Visual References of this page.

I found this image on Valentine's Day, and was struck by how much the composition looked like the heart associated with the day, and decided to paint it.  I didn't actually get around to it until 5 days later, which rather reduced that significance.

Again, I'm playing with brushes a little here.  The  main brush used is the one I like that's based on the Oil Brush from ArtRage, but there are others intended to give it a rougher distressed photograph feel, adding noise and such. It doesn't look like there's a lot of change from the main shapes of the second step here to the end,(there's obviously a large difference from the first), but actually the shapes and border of the helmet were refined right up until the final black and white stage.  I find the face interesting as this is not usually how I refine them, but the technique clearly worked even despite the slightly nightmarish visage in the second stage.  The final sepia colouring was just a colour overlay roughly applied when the rest was complete.

Time Taken: 90 Minutes
Software: Artrage 4
Based on: This

Yes, another image with no original source credit.  I'm feeling less and less guilt over it as time goes by, given that I'm not claiming they're based on my original ideas, I'm not making any profit on them (It's primarily just practice), and I do make at least an initial effort to find where the image comes from, and link you too it, if possible, when I can't.  In this case the first 3 pages of google results are almost all Pinterest, which has issues with letting non members see pins, so this link is the best I can do.  I'm a bit miffed actually - the image on that page is about twice the size of the one I worked from.

Not much to say about the process on this one really.  I did use a cropped image and a crosshair 2x2 grid to get the centre point and composition, although the image was so small that didn't help nearly as much as I would have liked.  Also of note is that her expression changes marginally three times in the three stages shown at the bottom.  The one in the middle is the one I posted to facebook, and has her left eyebrow slightly raised from the one on the left, with the one on the right having an additional minute of work done to it to fix something I didn't like about her mouth and cheek.  If you're really eagle eyed you might be able to spot the difference.

Time Taken: 30 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: A Photograph of Bill Murray by Leif-Erik Nygårds

Can we just forgo reasons for this one? All this typing is making my hands tired, and really 'Bill Murray' is all the reason required.

I do find it amusing that he looks increasingly less like Bill Murray the further along I get.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes
Software: ArtRage 4
Based on: Personal photograph of a local cinema

The second of my Designated Area series.  I think I took the picture when I was going to watch Guardians of the Galaxy.  More an experiment in working with perspective than anything.

Y'know, I think I accidentally rescaled these using the wrong scaling method?  If you squint at the first few stages here (after clicking to enlarge) you can see the perspective guidelines, but they're really pixelated, and they shouldn't be.  That's unfortunate, but I'm not going back to do them again.  Not much else to say about this - it was as straight forward as it looks.

Time Taken: 50 Minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: This Stock by ChamberStock on DeviantArt

I'd been meaning to do something based on this photograph for ages, and I'm sort of sorry I ended up doing it as this experimental piece.  Basically I was mucking about creating a triangular brush on photoshop, and painted this to try it out.  It's an interesting look, and probably useful in places but not very refined (plus, I think the proportions are way off).

The whole painting was done using the same brush.  It has a sort of pixilated look if you use it correctly, which is also an interesting effect.  Other than the funky brush there's not much else of note to say about this piece.

Time Taken: 35 minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: N/A

So here I am mucking about with brushes, still.  Still not completely happy with them, but they are getting better I think, and closer to what I'm after.  Both this one and the next came about when I was scribbling with the various brushes as I tested them, and then saw a picture beginning to emerge and pursued it, so it's all a bit chaotic, and not remotely polished.

Time Taken: 30 minutes
Software: Photoshop
Based on: N/A

And here's the second one arrived at from the same basic technique of no technique at all.  More speed sketches than Speedpaints really.

Time Taken: 120 Minutes (+5 Minutes)
Software: ArtRage 4 + Photoshop
Based on: Various

This looks very different small, surprisingly so.  It also looks a bit different to the version I had 5 minutes prior:

Which was because in a rare turn of events I took the original ArtRage version and pulled it into Photoshop for some post action (oh man, does that ever sound filthy).

It's not based on anything specific, I just went into Pinterest and decided to pull out the first few things that seemed interesting to me, and base a painting on them.  They were, in no particular order:  A guy in a coat with a large collar, a woman in a shiny skin-tight top, and two asian women.  I'm not linking to most of them because, well, I thought I'd already pinned them all in the past, but in fact I'd only pinned the guy in the coat (or maybe I did pin them, but not where I thought I did - whatever, I can't find them now).

The woman with the skin tight top was the rough inspiration for the pose and the sleeves, the inspiration for the jacket comes from the guy's collar and the face is evidently from the asian ladies.  In a fairly rare move I actually roughed it out before starting (I do rough out speedpaints on occasion, but usually when I'm directly basing them on something).  The final version, pulled into Photoshop, was first cropped (because I made a real mess of her hand - really, it's deformed, ill proportioned and generally wretched, and didn't want to do any more painting - 2 hour time limit was up, but I gave it the extra 5 all the same) and then some color tweaks and blurring the background.  Nothing terribly surprising here.

One thing of note though - her head looks slightly twisted at an odd angle.  that's not intentional, I just messed up the perspective.  Also, her neck is not well done, at all. I couldn't crop that out like the hand though.

And there we have it - nine speedpaints.  I'm not sure it's a record, but it's more than I usually post at a time.  Maybe I shouldn't wait two months before posting the next lot.

* I lied about it being fun packed.