Thursday, November 18, 2010

Portrait Marathon update: Harry progress

Ah, the trials and tribulations visited upon us by technology!  (Or, at least by our misunderstanding of it!)  My website work resulted in having two versions side by side, which was messing things up, so I had to (AUGH! Scary!) delete everything, and re-upload my entire Xan's Art site last night.  Figured I might as well take the opportunity to do a Bio page.  I wanted to keep things personal, not formal: like me!  That meant going through some OLD stuff, including school pictures, product design sketches, and comic book coloring guides.  Go see my bio and tell me what you think!

While that was cooking, I had time to work on Harry.  I got my photoshop "sketch" the way I wanted it, printed it out for reference, and did my drawing onto the canvas.  There's not a lot of information in the photo, no matter how I tweaked it, so it will have a strong back light reflected off the water and sky, leaving the side towards us mostly in deep shadow.  He's got a wonderfully idiosyncratic profile, so that's perfect, anyway.  Once I got the drawing nailed down, I washed in the first blues, mostly in the ocean and sky, layering in warm and cool, letting the brush skip over the little white-caps to give the sea some texture.  I laid in some very pale warm blues in the highlight areas on Harry's face, as well.  Then I floated on just the sheerest layer of naples yellow (a warm, summer grass/butter yellow) into the foreground water, getting thinner towards the cooler horizon, then on up into the lower sky.  The sky and earth reflect both warm and cool back at each other in ways you don't have any reason to realize until you're trying to reproduce them convincingly!  (Those blurry areas along the bottom are where wet paint smeared my scanner!  URGH.)

So, that's where we're at this blustery November morning.  That is, after I went all through my site and noticed that all my links that were supposed to go to Stroke of Green in fact went to Greytalk!  I have no idea how that happened.  Some gremlin presuming to know what I want, I assume.  Not that I don't love Greytalk, which, of course, I do, but, c'mon!

2 comments:

  1. love the bio!!! and the pics!!! the upper right is the very one I had been thinking of when I mentioned Tali's eyes looking like yours. gotta comare 'em! love Harry, too. amazing agin!

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  2. Really? That pic? Well, okay. Maybe in the eyes. :) Gotta love those bangs! Looks like I chewed them off in my sleep! Glad you like the bio.

    Yeah, Harry looks good on my wall. Maybe I'll keep him!

    ;)

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