Working on first Schoolism Painter Assignment

Well, I got notice tonight that my first Painter Schoolism.com assignment is due on Sunday. EEEK! For some reason I thought we had at least a week, and the class started Feb 28. And one would assume that the work was due a week after one had a chance to watch the tutorial video, which for me was Monday (Feb28) night. Woe be those that didn't have time to watch the class video until Wed or Thurs!

So, at least I had decided I wanted to draw my friend Jacky dressed up as her old drag king performing alter ego Gary. And I used Facebook photos for reference. Yah this is probably illegal or something. Who knows who the photographer was. Beware of Facebook drag and drop, or "download this photo in higher resolution"... ANYONE might be painting YOU right now!!



I did some screen captures as I went along. We were supposed to do a sketch of a person (in the class a head shot with a bit of shoulders), then import that into Painter, and color it in greytones, trying to get a full range from black black to white white. An painting by Ingres is the reference. Love me some Ingres!

I did the sketch in Painter as well. Well, here are the step by step so far. And no I am not done, and yes, I should do a new image for my actual hand-in assignment as I don't think I deviated from the photo enough (I only added a hat... egads a slave to my reference material Am I).



Starting to sketch in Painter using one ref for the face and another for the hat.



Flipping Horizontal to fix errors:




Pretty much finished the sketch. Now adding a gel layer with a grey fill at opacity about 60%.


Starting to use an eraser on the grey layer to block in the highlights.



Another new gel layer that I am using a black airbrush on to block in the darks. Fun to get all this established beforehand. New for me.


Compressed all the layers, now using the teacher, Ryan Wood's custom brushes to paint. The fun thing is that using ALT to get the underlying colors, one doesn't have to chose colors on a palette but rather just pick up the tones already established in the drawing, just turning them into "paint" and brushing them on. Tricky tricky tricky!!!



Established the background a bit more.


Went in with a rough brush to bring some texture into the hair, clothes, facial hair etc. Getting too "soft".


Well, that is where I left off. I have to get to bed... 7am now! eee! Definitely a work in progress. The eyes are too large (I always seem to make faces too squat and eyes too large), the planes on the face aren't well established, esp on the left side. Too little differentiation between the textures of skin, hair, cloth, hat. But hey, not bad for a first trial of this new way of working. Learning a lot about the controls, layers etc. I'll try to finish this up and then get a "from scratch" original character invented and painted to hand in for my actual assignment to be graded. I do hope that Mar 6 means before midnight. Egads. So much for having Sunday night or Monday to work on it! Ooo the excitement of Back To School, with Deadlines. My clients usually just pay me and never give me grades or even any feedback on the final artwork.