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The top piece is a mix of many different things. The girl is my first attempt at painting one of my sketches with oil paint; specifically, Shiva Paintstiks. I then scanned the painting onto one of my CitraSolv backgrounds, added a few digital brushes and a few other layers to get the finished piece. Here is the original oil painting on watercolor paper:
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One thing I found out was the iridescent paintstiks do not blend very well at all for the effect I was wanting to achieve. Of course, all I had when I started out was a set of iridescents. I had to order the regular stiks and then wait for them to arrive before I could try this lesson. Have I mentioned before that I'm impatient?! Anyway, once I had the correct type of paintstiks, they worked beautifully (after much practice). There is still a lot about this piece I don't like but for a first attempt, it'll do.
The lessons using the paintstiks were from the second week of class. The first week, we sketched many different faces with our pencils and practiced shading them. I can never get enough instruction on the nuances of shading. I took one of my favorite sketches and put her into another CitraSolv background in this digital piece: