I was initially inspired by a the Draftsmen Podcast (can't remember the episode anymore) where Stan talks about his painting process (sort of). He mentions that when he makes a piece and along the way he starts to not like it, he doesn't just stop and start a new one, he finishes it and then starts a new one. So that's what I've been doing.
In my free time I've been drawing this woman:
and every time I don't like the painting I've finished, I start a new one. And here are the horrible paintings and the one that I deem a success, with some of my comments : D
If I didn't know what this women was suppose to look like, I would have probably said this was good enough.
This one
this one I hate the MOST out of all my attempts. The only thing it probably gets is shadow placement.
It is absolutely horrendous
This might have been because by this point I got lazy and I just wanted this painting to be over with cause it was taking me like a week to finish. I wasn't even halfway done when I already knew that I hated it. I was still desperate to save it that I even used the blend tool on pretty much everywhere.
By the time I was done I was like, "Okay, how do I not do that again?" So I looked some of J.C Leyendecker's artworks (one of may fav artist) and some art analysis vids and a tutorial on his style, as well as videos about measurements, and at the end made this:
Looking at it now and comparing it to the last painting, the one true success, I still really like this piece. To me it has so much character and charm because of the coloring and the brush textures. You can see it very obviously on the nose and right cheek, and it's there because I was a only a little bit lazy this time.
But I'm sure you could probably tell why I had to restart.
The measurements are off.
And this was a personal thought but the painting really is too orange. As much as I do still love the colors, it just deviates too much from the reference. Although many of Leyendecker's works have this warm look to them, that's more because of the warmer, orange undertones he adds, but if you look at his work it doesn't particularly look orange.
I did the whole thing again, this time started using the ruler tool in my drawing software to really get the colors right, also looked up some tips for shading and ended with this:
I didn't mention this before but this one probably used the most layers out of all the attempts. The eyes, brows, hair, hairband and skin are all in separate layers while other attempts only used one. My third attempt used like 3, for the hair, hairband and skin.
This last attempt also took the longest (mostly because of school and my teachers dumping a bunch of work on us cause it's almost the end of the semester). But because of that I've been working on this for about a month.
I think in total I've been drawing this women for about 3 months now. And no offense to her but I'm absolutely sick of looking at her after having to look and paint her for so long XD.
Here are the speedpaint TikToks for these attempts (yes I even mad one for the worst attempt)
the title of the song here very much captures my feelings when I was finishing and finished this piece
The vibe of the song very much represents how I felt when I looked at this piece. (honestly would have preferred Judy Garland's version but TikTok didn't have it)
Really loved Angela's Detective Where's My Coffee character and had the absolute urge to draw him in a Waluigi-esque way when I saw that mustache start steadily raising up.
I thought the idea of Detective Where's My Coffee wearing a suit that's way too nig for him hilarious and tired to incorporate it in my drawing (not so sure how successful I am with that).
At some point I plan to come back and clean up the lines a bit and at least color in the striped jacket and tie because I think they're too iconic for me not to.
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