Time for a non-photo, but a drawing and painting post.
Any of you checking out my profile/blog will notice that there are a lot of photo posts with a few painting ones scattered in there. One of those is of the sketching phase of this finished painting.
In reality, I am doing a lot more drawing and painting than 'simply taking photos' though I am an old-school photographer, 35mm film etc., and switched to digital around 2000. These days I am using my iPhone a lot more than my DSLR, simply because it is a lot 'handier' and phone cameras have gotten so very good.
But that doesn't mean that every photo taken is a good photo ready to be published. This overload of photos is one of the reasons I moved on or rather diversified my art by a) doing photoart i.e. making composites out of several photos, blending them quite expertly so you won't notice, making them into a totally different and new scene, and b) going back to my artistic roots of drawing and painting.
And now I got totally side-tracked. I really just wanted to post another painting, but now I wonder if I should rather show you one of my photo composites.
Hmmm, what to do?!
Nope, I'm going to stick with the original plan and am posting my finished Flower Fairie. This one here was painted from start to finish on my iPad Pro in Procreate and is pretty much an emulation of my traditional mixed-media workflow.
I started as I always do with pencil scribbles that turn into shapes that turn into something sketched. In this case - this:
Very often I am drawing female portraits and if you follow my work you will see that I have got a thing for a) eyes larger than life and b) pointy ears - yes, I like Star Trek, too 😃.
In this case, I liked the pencil drawing so I decided to paint this sketch. In a separate file and later layer, I started with painting the background in my favorite colors of teal and purple.
Throughout the whole painting process, this background is the only thing that stayed on a separate layer till the very end. The painting of the fairie(s), flowers, etc. is all done on one layer, just like in traditional painting everything is on one canvas.
Actually, not quite true, because I also kept the sketch layer separate, on top, and just lowered its opacity. Like you would erase most of it in a traditional workflow. Also, in the gif at the bottom of this post, you will see color swatches in the bottom right - they were also kept on a separate layer, just like a separate piece of paper.
I started the painting with the skin tones, lights and shadows, then the eyes, mouth, nose, played around a lot with the eyebrows, and modeled the nose quite a bit, too. Then I added rough coloring on the flowers, the dress, the mini fairie, and the flowers, before going into the more detailed work.
For the main painting, I used oil color brushes, which emulate wonderfully the mixing feel of paint on canvas. If you look closely at the swatches you will see that I actually mixed paint of two colors right on the canvas instead of using the color wheel as you usually do in digital painting. That was very refreshing once I discovered that and I'm sure I'll be using these brushes in the future.
Once I was happy with the shadows and highlights of the painting I drew in the details. In traditional media, I would use a Micron pen, here they were drawn with a black ink pen or ink brush.
The final touches were the fairie dust and giving the painting a bit of a vignette to give focus to the face.
And here it is, the final painting. I hope you like it as much as I loved painting it.
p.s. according to Procreate stats this painting is made of 28348 paint strokes that took me 13h 19m 😊😄
A little bit of the processes I described above, here now in a gif:
