Friday Night Coffee

"Let's go for a walk and a nice, hot coffee"

I drew the sketch for this painting earlier this week as a quick doodle on paper.  I still feel like I have a lot more control with a pencil than in Photoshop, so these digital drawings are still largely experimental. 

My painting process is still largely single-layer-ish, in that I create a new layer everytime I take a break from painting, and I always paint on the front-most layer.  Mistakes and changes are whited out and then painted over.  

This is a 'free-form', unguided approach to painting, which lets me think decide on things as I get to them.  Essentially, chaos brought into order.

I think I could have made changes to the character's legs a lot earlier, if I spent time in the "roughing" phase.  Whenever I start a new painting, it's easy to get very excited about laying down colours and paint, and just overlook basic balance issues.  You can see in the last version below, the angle of her hips and the shape of her top changes.  These are adjustments that should be addressed earlier to avoid paint-overs.  Her hands should have been more defined from the start.

I am still wary of doing any sort of line-work in photoshop.  The initial lines were pretty rough and I ended up painting over most of it.  I added a rim light around the top half of the character, basically painting out the outline with white.

From here I want to try painting some extreme close-ups.  What does an eyebrow look like?  What about a lock of hair?  How do I think skin can be painted?  These are questions that I don't run into when painting a character at this distance.