This is a painting completed in February 2005. It was a Portrait Class project which took a total of around 65-75 hours to complete. The small images are step by step photographs taken during the painting process, and the large image is the final painting after detail and skin texture are added with an eraser and colored pencil. The main colors are blocked in at the beginning, but refinement is withheld until the very end.
After a couple of hours of color adjustment, approximately 10 hour. At this stage, detail has not been added to the face, because it is best to wait until all the colors are correct first.
There are many areas still to be corrected. For example, one of the front teeth is too dark. The arm is also to dark at the edges. It usually wait until the very end to introduce skin and hair texture.
Detail of final painting showing skin texture. Subtle nuances created by an xacto knife, an eraser, and some colored pencil can build convincing skin texture. The etcetera technique also helps the believability of the skin and hair texture. Fine hair is created using shield-reveal technique, and split frisket technique. Airbrush constitutes about 99% of the image.
Ian, Dru and Darryl pose in front of the Tica original painting during the April 05 Workshop.
Ian, Dru and Darryl pose in front of the Tica original painting during the April 05 Workshop.
About this painting
This painting started as an exercise for a portrait workshop . It was taken with a digital photograph of a local model (Tica) with a Nikon Coolpix 8700, then printed on an Epson 9600 printer. The goal was to work from reference that provided great lighting, good detail, and accurate skin tones.
Tica has incredible skin, with a challenging range of colors. As it turned out, the range of colors in her skin proved to be a little overwhelming. Normally, it takes about 7 or 8 colors to recreate an individual's skin palette,However with Tica, it's necessary to mix around 20 different colors to capture her range of color. There were also a few interesting artifacts introduced by the digital camera such as a blue halo around the earring.
Art is the selective re-creation or conversion of reality by the human mind into concrete imagery according to an artist's metaphysical value judgments. Real or imagined concepts are filtered and altered through the human mind to the artist's hand to create an image or sound that did not exist before. The reason photography does not qualify as art is that the process removes the filter of the human mind as an interpretative element. Although photography requires technical skill, in the final analysis it is only a mechanical recording of reality.
