Thanks a lot for the nice comments Don ! This is the first time I don’t hear anything about edges, so I must be doing something right
I made some adjustments based on your feedback. Touched up the left hand – it did not have the same level of details as the right one.
That patch on her back came from doing last minute touch up with a large brush and not going back to smooth things out afterward. I think I fixed it.
I also injected some red/orange in the shadow of her left arm, darkened the roots of her hair a little (I missed that before) and added a bit of red to the shadows of her legs.
This week will tell if this was a one time thing or not.
[female 4-final-11]
Looking at it again this morning, I agree. This is where my lack of knowledge in anatomy shows. Ideally, I should just ignore the reference and painting something valid anatomically
I will try to mute it a little more tonight. It still pops out too much on her back. Don will probably tell me to move on and start a new one, but I got her that far – I really want to leave her in a more stable state.
Another update after Roman and Mathias comments. Thanks again for pointing out these issues
I will leave her as is for now and work on a male figure. Maybe after a week or so, I will find more obvious things to work on to improve it.
Resizing the canvas (or the figure) depends mostly on how much you deviate from the model. There is no rule really.
I posted a progression of the major steps. At first, her legs were were too short. I had to resize twice to get working proportions, but then the painting was cropped too close to the edges (as Mathias pointed out correctly). So I had to resize one more time to make more room around her.
The final steps after that were mostly detailing and smoothing over the figure (as well as minor adjustments around edges).
I found that I copy/paste/move areas of the painting a lot more in portraits, as they have more recognizable features. With this figure, I only had to rezise the legs to restore the right proportions.
[female 4-final-12]
About an hour and a half into the male painting.
I wasted too much time last night and today experimenting with Painter 11. I am not impressed so far – a lot of old, easy to reproduce bugs are still there – but that’s another story.
I tried to keep loose strokes and global features at this stage. I already had to adjust the position and size of the legs.
I also tried to keep bold colors for now, because they tend to become dull as I inject more of the background into the skin.
Overall, it looks like it is taking a good direction so far.
Edit: Now this is really weird.
Here is a screenshot of the same jpeg file side by sode. One is displayed in my browser and one is displayed on my desktop. The desktop one has definitely more contrast than the browser one. It looks like something was faded when I loaded it to CGTalk. However, the screenshot preserved the correct contrast and was not ‘faded’.
[male 5-01-02]
More structural and value adjustments – still loose at this point.
Feet are weird.
[male 5-04]
About two more hours adding details to the male figure. I will spend the rest of the time cleaning up the background a little.
On the bright side, I figured out a color profile that both Painter, Photoshop and my browser seem to like.
The colors are still a little bright but at least they look like what I have on my screen.
Edit: Another hour of background cleanup and color corrections to better integrate the model and tone down some of the bright colors.
I may touch it up a little more tomorrow if I get a chance.
[male5-07]
It looks like this is as far I will get with this one for week 5. Once again, drapes are a problem.
I did not have as much time to work on it as last week, so there are many rough areas left. It still looks unfinished in many ways.
I seem to always reach a brick wall at a certain resolution. Going lower introduces all kinds of tiny details that in my mind, turn the painting closer to a photo. On the other hand, I would like to preserve a rough, painterly look but it seems that I am not getting a clean finish I would like.
Hitting the balance between painterly and clean finish is still a grey area to me.
[male 5-08]