JonnSnow

Portrait painting of Roswell Ivory from her photograph Lace. She is a gorgeous English model, and I've had some photos of her in my favorites for quite a while. This particular photo attracted me because of her expression, which I haven't quite captured. For one thing, her head is tilted back slightly, and my painting reads straight on. Something I'll have to work on. Better location of some of the facial landmarks, I think, would help.

Found some very nice inks done by devgear. Made flats (no shading). There are three layers in the download: the gradient background, the actual flats, and the line art. I did not flat out the facial features, because when I do shaded work, the eyes and mouth always get a lot of hand work anyway, so it didn't make sense to me to spend time flatting details that will probably be erased or painted over. There's also a place under the big foreground rock where I couldn't really figure out what's going on (is it vegetation, rocks, reflections??? I can't tell) so I just left it alone.

I designed a signature block that I included under devgear's signature which is under Randy Green (the pencil artist, or originator of the piece). I am told this is the proper form for signing work when the sketch artist, inker and colorist all work on it. I suppose if someone comes along and shades it, their sig would go under mine. I left room for it. The character, Aspen, was designed by the great Michael Turner, who didn't sign it, because he didn't draw this one, he just invented the character. I'm thinking of redoing my sig block using vectors, since it would scale better and I could make the curli-queues smoother than they are currently.

Downloading PSD files at DA requires a preview also be downloaded, so you can see what's in the file. And, even though the file is Photoshop format, all the work, including making the psd file, was done with Gimp.

Aside from the remarkable line art provided by artguy65, there is something very attractive about this piece that I can't quite put my finger on. When I figure it out, I hope to do more art with... well, with whatever it is that catches the eye and draws it into this piece.

A lot of this work was done with fills and erasing rather than straight on painting. I find I have better control, somehow, when erasing than with putting down original color. Fortunately my painting software (the GIMP) lets me merge layers and make it as if I painted it rather than used a partially transparent stencil. I imagine most 2d graphic software with layers can do the same thing.

My first one. I found an excellent tutorial by tanathe tanathe.deviantart.com/art/Spe… , found a nice source of creative common landscape photos for reference www.forestwander.com/ and dived in. Well, it took a lot longer than I expected, working phase by phase, taking long breaks, doing other things... the usual. Anyway, three days and about three hours pushing my intuos pen, and I wrapped it up.

It's not really finished according to the tutorial. There were several steps at the end, paining in details and so on, that I did in a very perfunctory manner. But after three hours, I got impatient to post it, so I did some post processing (color adjustment layer), then erased little bits of that layer, because it tended to wash out the highlights on the little waterfalls in the stream. Oh, and that cloud in the distance is judicious erasing of some of the adjustment layer, as well. All in all, I'm satisfied with it as a first attempt at speed painting. I like the technique. work flow. whatever. Beginning with a white canvas instead of line art is fun, but a very different experience.

I have more reference photos from ForestWander, so look for more speedpaintings in the weeks to come.

Yeah, a little unseasonal. I'm working on textures, and this piece seemed to be custom made, with leather, metal, fur, cloth. It's an early version of Pepper. Shortly after I arrived on DA, a picture of Pepper crossed my stream. Lovely girl. Figuring she was a game character, or from an anime or comic as so many named characters are, I did a google search and found nothing relevant. Months later, I discovered Pepper is an art project by artgerm.

Anyway, the leather pants came out very well. Also, this image also benefited greatly from a violet adjustment layer to bring the skin to life, moderate the shades and tone down some of the sharp tonal edges on the green stuff. Makes sense, skin has some blue under it, and I generally paint it in shades of red, so the purple adjustment layer adds just a touch of blue glaze to the skin, making it much more life like.

I also like the fur effect on the hat. artgerm drew in some of it around the edges, but it didn't look right with a large blank area in the middle, so I continued filling it in with tiny short strokes in varying shades of green.