portrait

(updated) Seemingly where I spend most of my arting time

A portrait of my girlfriends parents. It is always tough for a portait let alone two so it took me quite a while. As you can see I did the usual background trick of duplicating and resizing the foreground which always ties things up nicely.

I don’t often do a full body piece as I prefer to focus on the face so I get a bit caught up in not putting enough detail into the face itself. I overlaid a texture file created from playing around with GIMP to give the effect of rain and changed up the background from the original reference.

I had lots of fun with this one, I initially tried a spherical stencil in ArtRage to get the basic shading and then went from there. I followed quite closely to the reference with extra emphasis on the top down lighting and a changeup of the colours

All three of them!, I tweaked Winnifred a little and blended her hair with the other two using the palette knife in ArtRage. Originally I had Winnifred a lot lower down but it didn’t really seem to work so I added a little more chin and aligned with the others.

The first of the Sanderson sisters that I attempted, the final version here is a little different than my original idea when it came to typing all three of the sisters together, originally I had also cropped out the lower part of the chin (as an accident) and it seemed to work well, but eventually relented.

This was actually the second Sanderson sister I completed but set the tone for all three of them. I went for a more comic book graphical look rather than get too realistic and I think the flatter look of the face worked quite well for this, I then went and retrospectively tweaked the Winnifred portrait to align better with this style as I over sharpened / saturated / contrasted and impastoed the original.

The third Sanderson sister that I attempted, struggled a little, I think mainly due to the flat lighting on the the reference so had to add my own in for interest. I paid a little more attention on the shadow colour to focus more on a dark saturated red rather than a boring shadow to black which is what I normally do.

Using ArtRage and InfinitePainter on various drawing tablets

This was a portrait I completed for my mum’s 70th I really struggled with this one, I think it was the combination of: It being a self portrait Two portraits More of the body shown It took quite a lot of fiddling with GIMP to get everything to mesh together, I think the background as always was the key which was taken from as of yet an unfinished piece of:

Yes thats right!, pretty much my first portrait, mainly due to the dearth of my facial pictures. As you can probably guess I was lying down for this one, but uprighted for the portrait itseld, I think in the end I was quite pleased bow it turned out, the key was the mid tones, which I am working on as I tend to focus on the darks and lights too much and get carried away.

After watching the Killing I was inspired to render my favourite actor, that of Joel Kinnamen. I had the idea of warping and blurring to perspective the gun to add a 3d effect.

Extreme experiments in ArtRage textures. You will notice some bubbling effects which was an overlay from my camera from fat globules rising to the surface of a hot watered roasting pan I often use this text as it add much interest. The effect was either a marbly man or a rock of a man emerging from water. The detail was brought in by copious use of the palette knife.

Another originally created off a Maddy stream but of course morphed in someone who looks suspiciously like Daenerys, I added the lighting to make it more interesting and to be sitting in a cave, I am starting to realise now that telling a story is quite important, although it is not always possible with a simple portrait.

Using InfinitePainter and ArtRage

The first portrait of my girlfriend with her tube!. My main aim here was to capture her beautiful personality and to define a new lighting setup, a dappling type of sunlight across the face. Unusually for a portrait the face is very cropped and it took me a while to get this balance spot on. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Using ArtRage and InfinitePainter on various drawing tablets My first self portrait!

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art! This time it is a narrated process of a commission I did

I found an interesting reference of a woman’s face and started off in Infinite Painter, as I progress I thought that it would be fun to overlay my Frankenstein painting as I loved the lighting and see what would happen. As it turns out the best effect seemed to be really to push the contrast on lighting on this one. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

Finally a Sansa portrait that I was at least reasonably happy with, I still don’t think I quite got the likeness of Sophie Turner but it is close enough and the texture and the warm almost sepia tone gave an almost old master look.

A reworking of my original Faith torso painting as I wanted to push the lighting and to solidify the edges if possible. Added a lens flare type effect for a finishing touch.

Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

A commission I imposed on myself for my sister’s birthday, a family portrait, this one took quite a while and I had to be especially precise with the faces, every pixel had to be very accurate. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

A simple portrait painting using mainly the oil brush but really pushing the tonal contrast, I was quite happy how this turned out and is really the style I want to try and achieve for my portraits. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

An improvement on my original Dark Willow effort, much better blending and overall refinement on this one, I think now I have really moved on from my pastel techniques to that of using more of an oil brush.

I really wanted to change up the colours here, to obviously keep the essence of Buffy but to shine a much different light. Also to have a sticker spray configured to cast a splash of blood, for dramatic effect!! This was one of the first times I tried running an exported painting in gimp to have a go at tweaking the colours. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

A portrait I printed out and framed for my dads birthday. I wanted this of course to be very close to the reference but with a few extra textures and it turned out that a subtle blurring vignette would just finish things off quite nicely. I experimented quite a lot with different custom brushes especially when defining the whiskers. Using ArtRage on a Surface Pro to create some digital art!

A commission for my mum for her aunty. I started with a little tracing and then applied quite a number of textures. The difficulty with this portrait was mainly the monochrome nature as I am so used to pushing the colour.