Follow up to week 03 with Don’s feedback.
I tried to soften the rough strokes a little and work on her eyes and some of the edges.
I will spend some time on tidying up the male portrait tonight before moving on to the figure.
[male + female final]
One thing I have to keep reminding myself is to know when to let go of the reference and make changes for the good of the painting. What is true in the photo is not necessary desirable in the painting.
Here is the female figure in direct painting after a little more than an hour in Painter.
Trying to get a loose structure in place before polishing the values and skin tones.
[female 04-1-3]
Two more hours into it.
After reading Don’s recommendation to check Brush Tracking in Painter preferences again and again, I gave it another go and guess what ? brush tracking improved tremendously
Between that and better control of opacity, I am beginning to get more and more of a feel for brush strokes similar to the videos.
Skin tones are almost there – a few more hours of details and I think this one will be alright (except for the hair… and the drapes… maybe I should only paint bald naked models from now on ).
[female 4-4]
I was aware of the size of the legs (they started much shorter) and the cropping issue. I was missing her neck and shoulders though
Another two hours into this painting. The skin is almost unified. I still have to work on smoothing things out without blending and pay attention to those soft vs hard edges.
Still.. I am happy at how she looks once reduced by half A few more hours and she may even look decent at 80% resized.
[female-4-5]
I still have much work to do tonight to clean up the skin and edges. I will try to remember to warm up the cloth when I tackle that part (probably this weekend). I will keep hair and cloth for the end.
More refinements on the skin and some progress for the foundations of the hair and cloth.
The difficulty at this level is to keep going back and forth between the smaller scale of refinements and the macro scale of the painting to not lose track of the structure.
I really should start digging into some anatomy drawing books I picked up to get a better handle of how muscles relate to each other. That would help me with the light bumps on her lower back and should blades.
That will be for later… I am starting to see double Time for bed.
[female 4 6]
Not a lot in tonight, being Friday after a long week. More details to come tomorrow. I think I am about 9 hours into this painting so far.
I softened the shadows behind her knees a little and added some light variations on the ground to make her shadow on the floor stand out more. I may have to strengthen that later as it still looks too black on one of my monitors.
I also played with color contrast to increase the values a little. Doing so, I came across a neat little trick.
Instead of using Brightness/Contrast, simply duplicate the full layer and paste it in Multiply mode. Set transparency of that multiply layer to about 30% (more if you want darker colors).
Then, with your eraser, touch up areas you want to brighten. Since your lighter version is still under the multiply layer, you will paint in highlight with better control than using Dodge/Burn effects.
I will reserve tomorrow for more details on her hair and that piece of cloth.
[female 4 8]
Between 10 and 11 hours into it now. I am getting close to consider her done for this week. I think I need to take a break from painting tomorrow
I added more details to the hair and cloth. Especially, I tried to make the cloth structurally sound, even if I had to simplify some of the folds from the original model.
I also cleaned up her feet. I wanted to keep them less defined than the rest but they were still too rough. And I made the ground lighter to increase the feel of a shadow behind her.
The skin is still muddy in places. I will see if I can fix it without smoothing it out too much.
[female 4 9]
Final adjustments to her hair and some clean up on edges of the cloth.
I am going to call this one done as I will probably not have time to work on it more today.