Schoolism Assignment 9: Finishing

Well, I never managed to get the last (Assignment 8) step by step up I think, and here we are finished Assignment 9. For now I'll just upload a few of the images: the black and white original drawing from Lesson 3, the alla prima colour painting from Lesson 6, some reference material, a few steps along the way and several versions of the final work. I'll try to find time to upload the step by step in the next few days.

Here's the black and white image from Lesson 3:

Here is the "alla prima" painting from Lesson 6:

And here is the Andrew Wyeth painting I used for a palette:

Here are the revisions to the alla prima following my prof's critique of my work:

Here's what the alla prima painting looked like after working on it the first day of Finishing for Assignment 9:

Here's where I was at, at the end of day two of Finishing:

And where I got to at the end of day 3 of Finishing:

Here you can see a comparison of my Assignment 6 alla prima that I began with, and end of day 3 of Assignment 9:

The prof, Ryan Wood, put in foreground elements on another layer in the tutorial, and I thought I would put in brambles at the front (he had cables in front of a robot), so here is my bramble reference:

Here's where I was at the end of "painting" on day 4:

You can compare end of day 3 and end of day 4:

Unfortunately there are a lot of things I like about earlier versions: I prefer the day 3 painting to day 4, as I feel that the brambles, though framing the character, tie her in, and arrest her forward movement of escape. I also feel that when the front of the image was basically empty, 1) there was a nice transition of just "washy" in front of the cow, which she stood out against, to the more detailed darker behind her and 2) the more detail behind her draws our eye to where her eye is looking, and lends a feeling of dread to what may be coming. This feeling is lost when I added the brambles into the foreground.

I also feel I lost some of the richness of the body armour having put in glowing highlights on it, and a bit of definition of the cow's eye with the "glow" brush, and feel that in the black and white version, the eyelid overshadowed the eye more on the left side, instead of being uniform along the top of her eye like in the final version.

Finally, we were to do a canvas texture overlay to "unify" the surface and give texture.

Personally I dislike it, and erased it out about 50% here and there. I feel it looks kind of cheap, like when they print out an old master on a canvas instead of a piece of paper... you can tell the canvas has absolutely nothing to do with the original painting... it was just kind of "glued on" there in a (bad?) attempt to add "authenticity". I also feel that the canvas overlay lightened the lighting of my final painting a bit esp in the sky. Though that may have been more apparent in a 300 dpi Painter riff than in a 72 dpi jpeg image on a blog.

All in all, a very interesting and fun experience.

Here's the final (non-canvas-textured) assignment: