So last week, I went over days 1-3. Today I will be talking about days 4-5. The paining above is the final version of my portrait. For my first time, ever doing a digital portrait, I’m happy with how it turned out. Day 4 went over the fine details. It went over things like, the eyes, tattoos, fine details of the skin, eyelashes, and hair. Each one is done on a different layer so that if you make a mistake, you are not messing up the rest of the painting.

The first thing I detailed were her eyes and eyelashes. From my experience, I always thought that the “white” part of the eye was actually white, so I would color it white. In reality, white is too harsh of a color in order to achieve what is desired for the eyes. A light gray should be used instead. this makes the eyes pop but not in a harsh way.

The second thing I did with the eyes, was use a blending tool to smooth out the gray color so you didn’t see any lines. Then I placed one white dot at the top of her eyes, to make it look like reflection of light, which is in the reference photo. Once I did this, the eyes really stood out. It was during this process that I had to go back to one of the original layers and draw her eyelids. I had gotten caught up in sketching the eye sockets but had never actually given her eyelids. This made her look more human, once she had eyelids.

Then, came the eyelashes. In the past, I have drawn eye lashes one line at a time like little hairs but they’ve never really looked that good. A tip that I learned was to make the eyelashes using triangles. the base of the triangle is on the eyelid and then it comes to a small point. I did this across the top of both eyelids. You could do it on the bottom as well. I chose not to because I started that and didn’t think it looked that great.

My reference photo had freckles. So in order to achieve that same look, I used a texture brush. I used both the light and the dark colors in order to make the freckles pop on the different sides of her face. This step seems relatively easy but I did this particular step three or four times before I ended up with what is in the photo above. That probably says more about me than it does the actual step.

The last step was her tattoos. I saved this step for last on purpose because I wasn’t quite sure how to go about doing it. In the original picture, the tattoos on her chest are really hard to make out, so I kind of just had to make up something. What I ended up doing, rather than looing at the tattoos and eyeballing where they go, I traced the tattoos on the original photo and then copied that layer to my painting. In doing that, I learned that the proportions of my painting were off by more than I had originally thought. I left it because once you get to this point, it is difficult to go back and actually fix the proportions. After copying the layer, I just add color and that was it.

I was done.

I had finished my first portrait.

Now what I left out, was that it almost didn’t get finished. Remember how frustrated day 3 left me? It is because of that day that I almost didn’t finish. Day 4 and 5 happened on the Thursday and Friday of this one week portrait but I didn’t finish mine until Saturday afternoon or evening. Thursday and Friday, I as still so frustrated with how it looked and what had happened that I couldn’t bring myself to actually work on it. Before I left from visiting my mom, she made me promise that I would finish the painting.

So I did.

Now I talked about Day 4 but not day 5. That’s because I didn’t actually do day 5. Day 5 was about styling and making the painting actually look like a painting but I was happy with how the portrait turned out so I skipped day 5.

The thing that stuck out the most is “Finished, not perfect.” I try so hard to make sure everything is perfect and not just with my art. With my whole life. I want everything to be perfect for my students, for my husband, for my church but that is not how things work. I am not a perfect person. There has only ever been one perfect person and that is Jesus Christ. He is perfect because He is God. I am not God and yet I still try to be perfect. From this I have learned that I need to let God be God and me be me and allow him control everything because He is in control anyway. Things that happen in life, all happen for a reason and sometimes on this side of heaven, we may not know what things happen. But he does and everything He does is for our good.

Don’t give up. Don’t throw in the towel. Finish what you start and allow God to lead your path. He is perfect. We are not. He knows what is best and everything always works out for good.

Until next time, God bless.

The One Week Portrait

This week was interesting, art wise. I participated in something called The One Week Portrait, which was the put on by Paintable. The goal of the one week course was to create the best portrait you have ever created. That’s what is promised anyway. I decided to try it out and see what the outcome would be. I want to get better with different types of art and some techniques transfer from digital art to traditional art so I decided to give it ago.

Before the class ever started, I had to select a reference photo. The idea of the course is to paint a realistic resemblance of some photo. It could have been of anyone. Some people picked random photos that were provided by the class, while others chose to do more personal pictures and some even chose to use pictures of people from Hollywood.

This was my reference photo. It was different and met the criteria for the class. For beginners, the person needed to be facing forward and not have too many shadows going across the face. I knew the tattoos would be challenging but I figured I’d cross that bridge when I got to it.

On a side note: I used two programs this week. The first one was Artweaver and the second is Krita. I am finding that I like Krita more because it is completely free and has so many more brushes and tools than Artweaver. With the first program, Artweaver, there is a free version and a paid version. I ended up having to switch half way through this project because Artweaver did not have the tools I needed to continue to the project on Day 3 of the course.

Monday was the first class. The first thing that you have to do is sketch the subject but before you start doing that, you have to study the photo. You look at all of the angles, and where everything is in relation to other things. Such as how do the eyes line up with the lips or where do the ears line up with the shoulders or jaw line? This part took a while because I had to examine everything. Later, I realized, even though I had done a thorough examination, my proportions were still not what they needed to be. But more on that later.

So once I did my examinations and measured where everything was, it was time to sketch. The first thing you must remember is as you are building your painting, you will need to add different layers. This is especially true when you are working with different colors.   I found it especially useful for mistakes on a specific layer. If had built my layer correctly, then I could just delete the layer with the mistake and start over.

For the sketch, there were three layers. The first layer of the sketch was just simple geometric shapes. There was no detail and you were really just doing the outline of the subject. On the second layer, I went through and added some details but not too many. This was basically creating a road map for the final and third layer for the sketch. After I was done with layers one and two, I changed the Opacity to about 25-30% so that the layers would not bleed through. The third layer was the detail sketch. The result is below.

Day 2 was coloring and shading. I created a different layer for each color. I started with the skin and worked my way forward. The idea with coloring was not to select the darkest or the brightest colors on the reference photo but to choose the mid-value color so that lowlights and highlights could be added in later. It was on Day 2 that I learned a very important lesson. One that I have known most of my life but because I had gotten so involved in my work that I had forgot.

 ALWAYS, ALWAYS SAVE YOUR WORK!

 After I had done all of my work on Day 1 and had gotten halfway through coloring on Day 2, Artweaver froze and was not responding. I waited for a few moments to see if it would fix itself but unfortunately, I had to completely restart my computer. Once the computer came back up, I realized Artweaver does not have an autosave feature as I had assumed for some reason. So the first day and the last two hours of work (probably five hours total) was completely gone. Now, because of this blog and my Facebook and Instagram, I take pictures of my work and post it as I am painting. Thankfully, I had just taken the picture above and was able to load the photo into Artweaver. At this point, all I had to start over was Day 2, which was doable.

Once I had gotten the first step in coloring done, it worked on the shading. This was a mix of low and high values in order to get the light and shading affects from the reference photo. By the end of Day 2 lesson, I thought my picture look a little weird but Day 3 was on shading, so I left it until then.

Day 3 was the hardest of all the days so far! In my opinion at least. Day 3 was about blending and this is where traditional are and digital art differ. With traditional art, I use a smudge tool in order to blend my colors together. In digital art, you do the same thing but sometimes you have to use diferent tools or brushes in order to achieve the same affect.

My first frustration started when the class required I use a texture brush, a smudging tool and a mixing brush to achieve the desired blending affect. The course uses photoshop, which I currently do not have, and so I started looking around and exploring Artweaver (free version) for the tools I needed. I spend a good 45 minutes to an hour trying to make this program work and trying different brushes and tools but I just wasn’t getting the desired effect.

I switch gears and started looking for a free digital art program that had more to offer that Artweaver. I had remembered seeing Krita in a post by the teacher of this class as a software recommended outside of Photoshop. I did a little research and found that Krita is free and has more to offer than many of the programs that have to be paid for. I then had to combine all the layers on my painting in Artweaver and save it in picture format in order to upload it into Krita. At this point I had been working with this piece for about and hour and a half, close two hours and I hadn’t gotten any work done on it yet.

I explored Krita for a few moments and found some tools that would help with the blending. So, trying to put my frustration aside, I started to work on what I thought would be a relatively easy job. After all I was just blending right?

That’s where I went wrong. Thinking it would be easy. This is my first time and I assuemed I could so something right away that I have never done before. I blended and I bleneded and added more color and blended some more and it left my painting looking very muddy. I went throught this process about four or five more times in order to get it right but it just left me frustrated.

Art is my therapy but when it leaves me extremely frustrated to the point I want to cry and just give up, it is time to put it up and walk away. I sat and starred at the painting I had created for a few moments. At this point, I hated it because it wasn’t’ living up to the expectations I had set for myself in my head.

I wanted to give up.

I didn’t want to give up on this one and start completely over.

I just wanted to give up.

I thought I hadn’t done well and if I got stuck at day 3, how was I every going to be able to get to Day 4 or 5 and make my painting look anything like the reference photo?

I was a failure. Or at least, that’s what I believed.

Yet, thanks to some support from the facebook group attached with the course, and encouragement from my mom, I didn’t give up. I made one or two adjustments and I set it aside for the night. Day 3 was by far the longest I took working on the painting. The course had a saying that I really should start paying attention to.

“Finished not perfect.”

This means, that it is better to finish a step, day or a piece than have it be perfect. We are not perfect people and yet we expect things that we do to be perfect. The only one who is perfect if God. We are not perfect and we are setting ourselves up for disappointment when we expect our work or actions to be perfect.

As of right now, I have not finished Days 4 or 5 yet. I will be working on that later and let you know how they turned out in next week’s blog. This week I learned 3 things.

1) always save your work

 2) be paitent with yourself

3) Finish, not perfect.

I hope you come back next week to find out how to painting turns out. If you have questions about the programs I used to different techniques or tools that I used, please comment below or send me a message on facebook or instagram.

Until next time, God bless.