Art: Digital Painting of Sami

I wanted to do a portrait of her at one of her favorite places, the beach, inspired by photos of her homeland, St. Vincent and The Grenadines.

Art: La Boîte de Pandoras

I've always been really inspired by vintage movie posters, advertisements, & magazine covers, I think it's such a nice & classy style of art. So I always wanted to try and recreate this style in my art, and thanks to my lovely friend Malin, I was able to create a vintage styled ad featuring her and her blog, "La Boîte de Pandoras". It's really well done and one of my favorite blogs to follow, so I recommend it for anyone to check out.

Video: My Painting Process

This is a quick video I made while working on my Pop Princesses digital painting. I didn't want to do a full tutorial, but rather just show the work in different stages of the process. These are all techniques developed over time by practicing & learning from other artists I admire. I'll describe a bit of the process and what takes place in each stage below:

• The first step I do is create a line art sketch using my tablet in Photoshop. Sometimes I'll do the sketch in pencil on paper and then scan it, but this time I decided to do the sketch directly in Photoshop.

• Next I try to think of what the background will look like, because it'll affect the color scheme and lighting. For this portrait I didn't want a real elaborate background because I wanted to showcase the figures, so I decide to do a simple gradiated background with a half-tone pattern.

• After setting up the background, I take the pen tool (using the line art sketch as a guide) to create base color layers using the midtones for skin, underneath the line art on a seperate layer. This way I could hide the line art while I painted, but refer to it later if I needed it. The pen tool lets me create clean shapes for the figures, which is important because they'll serve as the basis for all the painted layers above them.
  


• Once the base color layers are done, I create new layers for each figure and use seperate layers for each body feature (hair, eyes, lips, and any clothes or accessories) on top. This way I can paint each item without worrying about messing up another, and can easily fix/make changes. I also do this for the skin shading and highlights using the clipping mask option, so I can shade without affecting the base layer underneath or painting over the edges.

• Using the clipping mask and selection tool, with my line art as a guide, I select the different areas of the body to render and paint them using a soft airbrush. I start with the shadows and then add the highlights, and afterwards I add texture to the skin using various brushes. I like to add the textures after the highlights on a layer above the skin, because otherwise the texture can get washed out from the brightness of the highlights.

• Once the faces and bodies are rendered, I then do the hair and any accessories next. Again, everything is done on seperate layers, so by the end of the painting I usually end up with close to 100 layers. To keep everything organized, I group all the layers according to each singer and each body part, and color code them for easy recognition.

• After some adjustments to the levels and background, and some fixes made to Rihanna's eyes, the painting is done. This is only one style of painting that I like to use, there are other methods and techniques that I like to experiment with dependent on the subject. This is just one example of how I like to work.

Art: Pop Princesses

I'm usually not that into pop music, but I must admit that after several nights out clubbing with friends last year that these ladies music grew on me. Sometimes it's really nice to just have fun, fast music you can dance and party too. So I felt inspired to do this portrait of Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry, who are the current princesses of pop music. Painting was done in photoshop, and I plan to post a quick video I made of my painting process sometime soon.

Art: Mixed Media Portrait

This is a portrait I did for my mixed media class. We used a 'wash and lift' technique in which you sketch out your image, lay down a coat of acryllic paint, let it dry and then lay down a darker shade of water color paint. After that I took a wet brush and lifted out the highlights before adding in a brighter acryllic on top.

Figure is Allen Iverson, one of my all-time favorite basketball players.