Digital Oil Painting: African Princess
When I checked my blog during the year-end/beginning post I realized that I have been posting almost exclusively photography. This is kind of funny because I haven't done much photography this past year but quite a bit of drawing and painting, both traditionally and digitally.
So, here I am now sharing one of those paintings.
Kind of fitting that I started this painting almost exactly one year ago. Sitting on a plane from Newark to Chicago for a meeting at our company's HO. I am a somewhat nervous flyer, so I usually don't do work-work on the plane. Painting on the other hand calms me down and puts my focus away from... flying.
As almost always I start with a 3000x3000 pixel transparent canvas, white or lightly colored background. Now that I think about it, I could should have added a textured background e.g. canvas or paper texture, hmmm, might still do that for the final pic.
Anyway, from the top left to the bottom right, the different pencil sketches go from pretty stylized to a more representational face (minus the pointy ears!) before I am mostly satisfied and ready to apply color. Usually, not always - it depends on how detailed I want to go with the painting - I will fill it all with gray so that I can add individual clipping masks for different colors, and parts of the painting thus preventing brush strokes from going astray and being able to adjust them individually. In the end, I will merge them all together and finish the painting on one layer.
The two bottom pictures are the final painting just with a different background and I definitely prefer the coral-colored one as it brings more harmony to the painting and makes it pop at the same time.
The whole painting process took 10:22:00 hours and 22528 strokes to complete - below you may watch a time-lapse of this process in only 3:39 minutes, if you like.
And here I added a texture to the painting using color burn as the blend moded, reduced opacity, and masked off even more of the texture on the princess. The blend mode shifts the whole picture's color towards red but I like it.
This is the final image. I hope you liked the process.
Till next time!
Have a great rest of your day!
Cheers,
(Ocean)Bee
That was theraputic watching you draw that so quickly! It was cool when you took the earings off to work on the ears. Very nice piece and process, thanks for sharing! It motivates me to do some more sketching.
I agree that watching timelapses is a bit therapeutic, however, the actual painting took over 10 hours, so not very quick in my book 😄.
Go and do more sketching! Once your new computer arrives you'll probably want to be doing other things - LOL
Oh I can imagine it took a while, but I do like the timelapse videos. I'm gonna get Sketching, but mostly pen and paper right now.
Looking forward to seeing your pictures and progress.
From someone who can only draw stick people, I'm amazed by your work and process!
Thank you so much! 😍
I hope you are doing well, I haven't been around much, so...
I'm doing well - just a busy time for me right now (which I guess is a good thing)!