I finished a piece that’s been in progress for a while.
The progress of painting it was incredibly painful, mostly because of my tendency to jump the gun and start painting straight from the color sketch. Here’s the original sketch in Photoshop.
Color is always a really important part of the concept for me, so occasionally when I hit the colors I like straight from the start I just want to keep painting, instead of going back and doing the whole boring drawing part first. So stupidly I started painting on top of this, and as you can see there’s… lots of stuff left to fix after a few coats of paint.
At this point I fininally stopped myself and got some reference. Fun fact: the face is referenced with from a female carnival mask I bought from Florence a year ago, I knew that would come in handy. I also had a ton of shots of Italian countryside from that same trip that were really useful. It’s funny how the place you live can be so ingrained into your head you don’t even notice, and only after looking at reference you’ll realise things can look different.
I’m really happy I managed to mostly stick with my original idea on this one, and some parts I’m really happy with (the tree), but next time I’m digging out paper and pencils before painting, I swear.
