Female portrait

I've been struggling with some digital portraits (I'll post my attempts soon), so I thought it might help if I went back to my strength and drew from a reference. This piece took a few hours to complete.

A couple of painting exercises

I haven't posted anything lately because I went to Argentina for a couple of weeks. Since I've been back in London I've been painting digitally a lot more. My whole life, I've only drawn using graphite pencils, so I really don't have any experience painting or working with colour.

The painting to the left was meant to be an exercise working in colour. The idea is to paint a sphere in greyscale, then paint another sphere in colour but match the value of the first sphere (value is the lightness or darkness of a colour). I started the first sphere using a soft brush, as in Matt Kohr's basic rendering video. But I don't really like the look of painting using a soft brush,  so I painted the second sphere using a hard brush and mixing the colours to get a smooth finish. The first sphere is definitely smoother, but I prefer the painterly look of the second sphere. I didn't learn anything about colour, but I'm pretty happy with the results.

I also bought a couple more of Matt Kohr's videos: Dynamic Brushwork and Imaginary Light and Shadow. I haven't put any of the techniques from dynamic brushwork into practice yet, but I've been working through the Imaginary Light and Shadow exercises. It's a lot harder than I thought. The painting below is one of the exercises. The key (the overall value of the painting) is too light and I screwed up the cast shadow of the middle object, so I need to go back and fix that.

More recently I started to do some digital portraits. I'll post them up soon. Also, I really want to do something about the look of this blog, so look out for some changes soon.