In my quest to continuously find new art exercises and ways to track my progress, I decided that I’m going to paint a self portrait on or around my birthday every year so that I can compare them. It’s been a busy week so I’ve only just finished the first of these but at least it’s done. I’d have been done a lot sooner if it didn’t take me two dozen attempts to get my nose looking (sort of) right.
I’m posting this at 4:30am, having just misplaced a good 5 hours hunched over my cintiq like an unusually creative troll. I suppose it’s what I get for deciding to try new things.
Some years ago I was given some advice that I should start my paintings entirely in shades of grey and then add in colours over the top with overlay layers and other photoshop wizardry. I’ve done this without a thought ever since as there’s far fewer variables when you remove everything bar value from a painting. However, today, for no reason that I am able to discern, I decided to pretend that I was a real artist and paint directly in colour over my sketch. I’m quite pleased with the results, which is to say that there’s slightly fewer things than usual that I’m desperate to change about it.
Also, she’s not only wearing a hood because I couldn’t get the eyes right. Promise.
I was fiddling with my brushes today and ended up painting a simple sausage shape that reminded me of a dolphin. I need a lot more practice with colour and difficult subjects like water, and the subject matter isn’t my usual thing, but at least it’s not another ball!
Also, a nose and some lips that spontaneously sprang from a doodle into a finished piece. I really should doodle more. I should also use reference, but that’s another discussion entirely.
Painting that eyeball yesterday inspired me to try and create the matching eye in Maya. It’s only a simple model and perhaps a little bit too textured, but I learned a lot about texture painting and shader networks that I didn’t know before. Fun!
More materials and reflections practice from today. The detail in the iris took far too long to get right, but I got there in the end.
I finally had time to practice a little today and I spent it painting this ghastly thing. It’s more of an exercise from a Gnomon DVD than a fully fledged painting, but it’s a (bizarre) start!
