Digital Painting

When an artist represents himself or herself in their medium, either as a painting, illustration or sculpture, it is called as Self Portrait.

It can be quite daunting and for those of us who are modest, it may see feel narcissistic. But trust me – I just tried it out. It is a challenging task yet a good creative exercise. As an artist, when you are trying to portray realism to the faintest extent, you would want to be able to capture what is called familiarity. Even when the ‘portraits’ of people (or even things) are distorted like in caricatures (see Tom Richmond’s works for example), the key is to capture the familiarity.

We have been observing ourselves from the day we became self aware. There will be very few who have not noticed some of the features of themselves in the mirror. A Self Portrait is just an attempt to capture the familiarity of oneself.

Here is my first attempt at a self portrait. I believe I have caught some of my features – I can see a lot of changes required, but I am going to let this one slide. I would do more attempts in future.

This was done in GIMP, using Wacom Intuos3, over a span of roughly 15 mintues. Before attempting this, I just peeked at myself on mirror, and tried to take a mental note of the features. After that, I opened up an new canvas in portrait layout and started with a new dull brown layer. This seems to be a better approach than face a blank white canvas. Then, I started out with rough form and kept refining it on new layers – going through with a smaller brush each time.

I wanted to do a colored version of the illustration, Too Old For Halloween.

I grossly under-estimated the amount of effort this would take.

With the amount of detail, and my choice of color palette – added to that the two sources of light, takes up quite a bit of effort to paint.

As you can see, I have approached this from back to front. And on each of those level/layer, I detail them with a fat/large brush to a fine/small brush.  Stay tuned – I will finsih up painting by detailing the two main characters, and perhaps adjusting some color levels.