Wk 2 Digital Painting - Head Value Study And Animal Drawing

     For the longest time, it's been my desire to learn how to paint digitally in Photoshop. Now that I have the time, I started taking an online digital painting course last week. Even though I'm not exactly a beginner in drawing, I am a beginner in digital painting especially in Photoshop.  I am pleasantly surprised, that I became comfortable with Photoshop quickly, after learning a few tips on how to navigate the interface. That week was sort of a warm-up.

     

     This week, I got a taste of how it's like to paint digitally.  Oh boy.... it's was quite a challenge. I didn't realize that painting takes longer, and requires a lot of patience.  After watching my instructor's painting demo, I started to do the assignment,  Using the sketch of the Vienna statue that I did last week, I scaled it up to just focus on the head for this week.

     My first difficulty was blending.  I didn't know how to digitally blend the colors using the brush tool and the color picker.  I spent hours and hours struggling on this till my hand hurts. This was what I managed that day... She looks angry at me already. Haha... (click to enlarge)

                                                         

     The following day, I worked on it again,and managed to get the hang of blending that I was pleased with the outcome. I managed to soften her expression.  At least she doesn't look angry anymore. I blocked out the hair and arm roughly. This allowed me to focus on other areas, when I got tired of working on the face.

                                

      On the third day, I continued on. The face keeps evolving as I work on it. At one point, I painted the lips much too luscious, it looked like Angelina Jolie's lips.  I have to tone it down.  A good tip Anne told us is to flip the image to get a fresh eye. I knew that, but forgot about it until Anne mentioned it. That helped a lot. I saw some distortions and managed to fix it on this version below.

        I was pleased with what I've done with the head so far and decided to take a break from it for awhile. I decided to work on the other part of our assignment, which was to draw animals in interesting poses on a black background. So I did this....  

                                               Photo Image by Leslie Thief

      The following day, back to the head painting, I decided to finish it up already, because there's more animal drawings to do. I worked on the hair, neck and arm area, plus a bit of the background, I tried to fix the face a bit of any distortions.  By this time, my hand started to really hurt, due to my previous RSI.   I decided to leave the head study for now and proceed with the animal drawings, and if there's still time, I will work on it later.  At this stage, I was happy with the result.

                             

     So after painting intensely for a few days by now, drawing animals was a welcome break.  I enjoyed drawing them that I drew 6 more animals over two days.

                               

Photo Image by Draco Art Stock

Photo Image by Draco Art Stock

Photo Image by Bahaloo

Photo Image by Chunga Stock

Photo Image by Hot N Stock

Photo Image by Deseo Nocturno

      Whew.... I've finished all the assignment for this week and I still have a few days left to spare.  So, I thought of going over the head study again and see if I can polish it up a bit. After a few hours of tweaking it, I decided to let it go.  I don't want to mess it up unnecessarily.    So here is the final head value study.

     It's been a very intense and productive week for me, I started out fumbling over how to blend the colors. After hours and hours spent just figuring it out, I managed to get the hang of it by the end of the week. Not too bad.... It's not perfect by any means, but for a start, this is really, really promising. :)

     To see previous weeks, click here : Week 1