Painting on the floor

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This is a 12+ years old self portrait, that needed a some finishing and fixing...at this point the main part that needs to be cleaned up is the shirt. I'm using the foil to protect the painting surface from hand oils.

I've always painted on the floor, mainly because I like to spread out, but also because I want quick access to all my paint tubes, due to the fast drying acrylics on the pallet. I decided to crack open my unused liquid acrylics along with my tubes. I've never used fluid acrylics for painting, but they definitely make life easier in some cases...they do dry-up really fast though, in comparison to the Winsor & Newton tubes, which have some retarder mixed in with them.

Starting to paint again

Over the last ten years I’ve painted very little, only a few animal portraits and nothing else. I’ve had new paint and panels sitting around the last couple of years, with the intention of diving back in…it just took a while to get there.

Before I get moving full force, I thought I’d warmup with a self portrait. Traditionally, I dry-brush large portions of my paintings…but paint, mediums, and retarders have come a long way, so I’m trying to work the paint more like oils…it’s producing pretty good results so far.

This is part of the self portrait which I’m currently working on. The head is life size. The weather hasn’t been cooperating, so I’ve been spending more time working on the left side of my face, and will pick back up on the right side when I have stronger light from the window. Winsor & Newton glazing medium has proven to be very useful for blending and tinting…far better than using water, or regular medium.

I made a minor wrong-turn a few days ago when I impulively decided to dramatically change the lighting. An hour into darkening the left side of my face, I realized a made a mistake, and spent the rest of the day repainting and reclaiming what I had covered up.

"Felled and Fallen" color WIP.1

I've started coloring "Felled". I've reverted back to a less green tinted version from the detail above. The green tint was added to help bring more focus to the angel's face (with the contrasting color), but I liked the slightly more muted tone of the original...I can always tint at the end if I decide to go back in that direction. The picture is about 40% finished, in terms of adding color detail and rendering, I also want to paint over more of the line art. I keep intending on doing some more simple pictures (this was suppose to be one of those) but they end up getting more complicated despite my original intention.

Dethklok Digital Painting WIP updated with final art

Above is the tentatively finished piece, any changes will be minor and probably visible only on the hires file.

Detail of the WIP. I still have plenty to do, the color is all down, but I'm busy refining and rendering...and in some cases, editing the drawing, like Murderface's head.

This is the start to the coloring to my Dethklok drawing. The sky is close to finished,  Nathan still has some work to be done, but I'll wait until I can get the rest of the picture blocked out so I can get a better overall sense of things. I also need to figure out how to handle the jaguar above Nathan, I may end up deleting it if it doesn't blend well with the rest of the picture.

Dog Portrait Paintings

These are the photos of the dog portraits which I was commissioned to paint, last month.  The original photos I was given were soft in areas, but I was able to use secondary photos of the same breeds to fill in the gaps of detail. Both portraits are painted with acrylic on Strathmore 500 series illustration board, the boston terrier is 15"x15" and the griffon mix is 13"x13".