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Friday, July 10, 2015

Speed Paint Portraiture

Hi everyone, I've got another speed paint to show here.

Been quite busy lately so I've been doing even faster speed paints. I did this one last night, just forgot to upload it. Instead of the usual environment or prop painting, I decided to take up anatomy and portraiture painting. As usual I take classical master works and try to deconstruct their pieces using the digital painting medium.

The reference I found is by John Singer Sargent, I really like his quick gestural brush strokes. It's really hard to keep your strokes minimal and still convey so much information. This time around I tried to keep within the same feel by using the more responsive brushes in photoshop that is intended to have that "brushy" feel instead of the usual default brushes I use for other speed paint exercises.

I think I still need to get a hang of the brushy feel, maybe I should attempt that in Paint Sai, but other than that I think I got the colors and anatomy close to the reference, with a little distortion here and there. The light yellow purple at the bottom left corner was a bit hard to mix, it is just very subtle and inputing a different value into the RGB channel, however slightly can make the resulting color seem off.

One thing I might do in future speed paints is include a post-apocalyptic feel with the subject matter. The cloth wrappings around the man's head would be a neat feature for keeping debris and otherwise unsafe particulate in the environment from landing on skin.