Saturday, January 8, 2011

2011 Excitement!



So it's been a while since my last post but for good reason. I took some time off from painting to begin doing portraiture studies to hopefully improve my portraiture skills and help foster growth in my knowledge of the human anatomy. I spoke to a friend who suggested that I do gray scale digital paintings and only draw from life. Here is one of the studies I did from beginning to somewhat end.

The point of this exercise is to train your brain to think more in the ways of form and value and less in the ways of contour. Drawing without first building some sort of rudimentary construction and contour is something I was really having a problem with which will become painstakingly apparent when you see my first attempt at this.
YIKES! I believe the technical term for work of this caliber, according to Wikipedia, is "Rubbish! Complete and Utter Rubbish!" That aside, you have to start somewhere however crude that start may be. Lets go over exactly what went wrong here. So off the bat, the rendering I've begun here is far too big; much larger than the subject on the right. The scale change ultimately sent me running in the wrong direction. By the way, what is up with that nose? I'll say it again YIKES! I spent entirely too much time in some areas while completely neglecting others entirely. The eyes and nose have been shaped and reshaped again yet the collar bone, the hair and pretty much everything else are almost completely untouched. This was a valiant effort and not without it's lessons.

Working around the piece as a whole and more importantly working to scale certainly helped me with my next attempt at this which looks something like this...
Much Better! She actually looks human! Ok, this time around i actually worked to scale and ended up with something much closer. So what's working here? The basic shapes are all there. The hair, however untouched it may be now, is generally the shape of the subjects. The face shape and anatomy is looking much tighter. The eyes are kind of working and my rendering skill has certainly improved. This is headed in the right direction but I'm having some serious angle issues. The angle and turn of the face is off and this is why the everything, especially the eyeline and nose, is not really reading correctly. The values are also off quite a bit. I only really have 50% grays and 100% black which has made the subject look flat.The darks need to be much darker and highlights need to be added. The hair while it's shape is fine, the lack of variance in value just reinforces the flatness of this piece. Es no bueno.

Since this is a digital painting done in Photoshop it would have been leagues easier just to adjust the levels and curves and fix the angles with the transform tool. Normally I'd have no problem with this but I'm doing this to improve my painting so I just took what I had and painted over it. Let's take a look.

Now we're in business! My angle and value issues being fixed has really turned this piece around. I starting working a bit of detail into the hair and even into her right ear and earring. This is as far as i took this particular study. All I really have left is the fine detail work but considering the size of this piece and the resolution of my reference I decided against it. Either way, even without it this piece seems to be working.

The entire purpose of these studies was to improve my portraiture skills and my knowledge of anatomy. I think this helped a great deal.Directly below this I'll post the gesture drawings I was doing to warm my hands before this exercise and also some thumbnails and sketches to show whatever improvements have been made through doing these studies.






Well, that's all the time I have for right now but just as a bit of a preview of my next few posts. I was contacted recently for a solo show at a nearby coffee shop. The reception is to be in June and my work will be there for just about a month. I'll need to make 10-15 pieces in the course of 5 months which means...........Yes you guessed it! More blog posts, More Blog Posts, MORE BLOG POSTS! Here is the thumbnail I've chosen to work on first.



This is proving to be an exciting 2011 indeed!
~Flewk