Portrait Sketch

I was very disappointed to be unable to attend my monthly figure painting session today. So, in self defence, I broke out the digital paintbox to attempt a quick study.

Most of my recent posts have been comics and cartoon related, but I have been looking at trying some of the painting tools in SketchBook Pro and MangaStudio 5, just to see how they stack up against my elderly version of Photoshop. And I have been very pleased with their performance.

This is an invented head, painted in SBP. I used only one brush out of a potential multitude of choices and a very limited palette. It very much resembles a first pass or rough block in with oils. Unfortunately I didn't save enough separate files to show the progression to get to this point, for which I kick myself. I'll try to do better next time... And someone has been urging me to do some screen recording videos for YouTube, so that may be in the near future as well.

I expect to spend a little more time with this one, and try to refine it to a higher degree of finish than anything else I have attempted in the digital studio. And the beauty of digital is that I can make changes on new layers and only keep the successful bits.

While I'm sorry to have missed an afternoon with my painting friends, this has been a very worthwhile afternoon's dabbling. I think this has great possibilities.

Trick or Treat

Well, I continue to play with Photoshop, and I think my skills are improving, to the point, gentle reader, that I am aboutto inflict a step-by-step on you...

This began as an unfocused doodle. At some point it implied the image of a skull, which morphed into, surprise, surprise, the personification of Death. But the tried and true left me a bit cool, so I thought, what if Death took an apprentice, a young woman, perhaps. Would she be angry, vengeful, goofy, mischievous, or just a little unsettling...?

My approach to painting in Ps has been a bit all over the map, so far. I've settled down a bit and decided to go with the grayscale-to-colour approach, really work on the value structure first, and then introduce colour. It worked for the Old Masters, and who am I to argue with long-lived success? I copied the drawing onto a new Multiply layer, so I could see through it, and began painting my values under it onto the Background layer.At this stage, I'm most concerned about simple blocks of only a few values. Mostly, I'm using a chalk brush, with Shape Dynamics off and Opacity set to Pen Pressure.

Following one of the great guiding principles, "work from the large, broad and general to the more refined and specific" I start to define the image a little more clearly. I refine the shape of the body and the hood of the cloak, and begin to paint the suggestions of volume, seperating the darks and lights. I've turned off the upper drawing layer now, so the bits of drawing you still see are from the original background image. Then I creat a new Overlay layer and wash in the first colour notes.

Now I have some base colour to work with, and I can continue to refine the shapes,volumes and edges. For the most part I will use the colour picker and adjust for saturation and value, in an attempt to keep the colour harmony intact. I don't actually introduce any new colour until I add the the rust (or perhaps dried bodily fluids) to blade of the scythe, with a textured brush.

A few more tweaks and fiddles and I think it's enough. It's still a long way from a finished illustration, but this was meant to be a learning exercise, and I think I've learned a lot. The face is still very much a coloured drawing as opposed to a painting, but I'll work on that in my next project.