It was a difficult decision - one that I postponed for nearly a year. A busy offline schedule, new interest in digital painting and general forum moderation fatigue made me realize that I was just delaying the inevitable.

I had a good time as a moderator. During nearly five years, the forum went through a lot of changes, mostly good. It gave me the chance to meet and work with wonderful people and allowed me to get a peek at the development process of Vue as a beta tester.

I wish good luck to SGT2005 and GaryMiller in taking care of Vue related activities at Renderosity.

Now... back to making more pictures.

Here are a few resources I came across.

Put your money where your mouth is by Ben Mathis - a good reminder of how easy it is to slow yourself down and think about doing things to improve your situation instead of actually doing something about it.

Along the same line, this video of Digital Painting with Bobby Chiu is a good reminder that motivation starts within yourself. His other videos are great tutorials as well as thoughtful ramblings about creativity, motivation, and dreams.

Time to zoom in, use smaller size brushes, smooth things out with a light blender at low opacity and add edges and other details.

The problem at this stage is to always remember to zoom in and out to preserve the larger relationships between structures in the figure. The 'thumbnail test' is a good way to make sure the painting is on the right track - reduce your image through smaller and smaller sizes. It should be working at every level. If it doesn't, the areas to work on will just jump at you.

Similarly, flipping the picture horizontally helps to uncover issues in the painting. It's amazing sometimes how well these tricks work.

Still, the goal at this point of the workshop is not to recreate the exact same image. Creating skin tones with a limited palette is a good way to force yourself to create a painting that works on its own and not necessarily a perfect copy of an original scene.

There will be plenty of time after the workshop to either push the realism further or just experiment with more abstract techniques.

The focus of this week is to continue with quick one hour studies to practice the first stages of painting - blocking the shape, tones and shadows. If feel this is something I need to practice more at this point, than the final stages of adding details and smoothing out a finished portrait.

Each study forces me to focus on shape and color, and leave details for later stages. When I start getting into details too early, it is easier to wipe them out with a few broad strokes and move on.

It is interesting at this point to look back and measure the difference in results in just a few weeks of practice. I am beginning to see shapes better - how colors,shades and shapes are related. The temptation is great to paint each area in isolation, whereas they are really part of a whole.

Another major change in how I see painting now is in how colors work together. How colors from the background find their way in hot or cool areas of the figure depending on the lighting conditions.

Many times I find myself applying the same principles of Perceptual Organization I learned in college, to suggest details with a few touches with the right alignment or contrast.

During this week's research, I found very interesting tutorials up at GFXArtists and ImagineFX.

In particular, some tutorials by Ron Lemen about Skin Color (Part I and Part II) and about value.

Calibration of the graphic tablet is key - whether in Painter or Photoshop, a harder setting will give you a full range of pressure and will allow for light and harder strokes. This is essential to define sharper edges and lighter shades with the same brush.

It is a good exercise to limit yourself to a single brush and a limited color set to being with. As you go, more and more colors are picked directly from the painting itself.

It is also good to learn shortcuts to increase and decrease brush sizes as you will end up constantly switching between small details and larger strokes.

A few observations after completing the two required portraits for this week:

- You have to block correct shades in key parts of painting and reuse from picking colors instead of going back to palette. Increases consistency of colors across painting.

- Again, brush choice is critical. As is calibration of tablet (firm tablet, flat brush with 40% opacity and 40% resat).

- Inject color from background in darker area of the portrait. Do not hesitate to inject bright colors in cheeks, nose and ears - we have a natural tendency to use muted tones.

- Pick one side for details (light or dark side) and improve details on that side only.

- Pay attention to structures in painting. Do not paint shaded areas in isolation. See the whole interaction between parts of the portrait,

It was very inspirational to see how far everybody progress just by watching a few video tutorials.

A couple of things I picked up during this week :

- Don't get discouraged when the painting is ugly and wrong. It will stay wrong for a long time but eventually things work out. Don't give up before they do.

- Work on a small size with large brush early. Things all into place a lot easier if the painting looks good at smaller scales.

- Use few brushes (one) and few colors. Limitations increase creativity.

- What made a huge difference was the selection of a brush with the right properties (sharp edges on the outside and soft transparency along the flow of painting).

- Nail the eyes, nose and lips early. The rest of the painting can be very forgiving if the facial expression is just right.

- Keep turning the color layer on and off as you go to make sure you don't lose the Value you blocked in black and white.