Old Lady Digital Painting

In our first Visual Design session, we had to produce a copy of an image that was handed out in class. I believe the purpose of this introductory exercise was for the tutors to get an idea of our level of experience in Photoshop painting.

I have an large amount of experience with Photoshop, but not digital painting. I have tried digital painting before, but the results were terrible. I believe this is because I have never managed to get the hang of painting in real life either. When I did try traditional paint, either I would end up with an attempted sketch completed in paint, or I would have to basically 'paint by numbers' where I would be essentially just colouring-in with paint. I needed to free myself from a sketching mindset when I painted, but I had always failed to do so.

However, purely by coincidence, the first time I managed to achieve this was in this introductory Visual Design session. I still found it difficult to control the movement of the pen through the tablet, but by the end of the session I had managed to change my approach to painting. You will see the image we had to copy and my three attempts below. You can also see how my approach evolved entirely in this session alone.

-------------------

This was the image we had to copy.

-------------------

This was my first attempt. 

As you can see, I had basically just attempted a drawing of the image. This "painting" is truly awful, and I am ashamed to say I am responsible for such an abomination. I completed this within the first 10 minutes, and I was immediately disappointed with myself. I instantly closed it and started again.

-------------------

This was my second attempt. 

I had to force myself not to draw it, but to paint it. I simply started blocking out bits of colour, and tried to sculpt those bits into shapes that resembled the image. If I caught myself trying to get into detail, I forced myself to erase it and go back to sculpting blocks of colour. This took me just over an hour to complete

I have to admit, I was relatively proud that I had completed this. The proportion had gone very wrong, but I had managed to create an image with a relatively accurate colour palette, and colour has always been something I struggled perceiving correctly. However, the proportion was really bad. I erased it all, but only after I used the colour picker to paint a colour palette that I could use for my third attempt.

-------------------

This was my third and final attempt. 

I hadn't completed her torso, mouth, scar and hair, and it's still not perfect, but I believe it resembles the original image somewhat accurately. I made corrections to the colour palette, but more importantly, I had managed to fix the proportion over the last image. I set opacity and flow to correspond with pen pressure, and by pressing 'Alt' to use the colour picker, I developed a method with which I could blend colours extremely quickly, and also fix mistakes I had made. This sort of efficiency is something that simply does not exist with traditional paint, nor does the ease of selecting appropriate colours. Perceiving and recreating correct colours is something I always found extremely difficult, but the ease that Photoshop provided allowed me to refine my colour palette to a degree of accuracy that I have never been able to achieve with traditional paint.

I still have great difficulty controlling the actual brush through the tablet, and I am currently incapable of producing a straight line. Luckily, there are no straight lines in the image we were asked to copy. This makes the inaccuracies in proportion either quite hard to recognize, or they look intentional. This took me about three hours to complete. I will admit to being incredibly pleased with this image, if only because it is such a massive step-up from what I have produced in the past and even at the start of the session.