Mixing It All Up

I just finished up week two of Misty Mawn's portrait class. I am so loving this workshop! There are a variety of new (to me) techniques that she teaches in addition to the portrait drawing and painting. This is definitely one of the best classes I have ever taken.

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:

One of the challenges, for me, of working with the paintstiks is getting the colors to blend to achieve the color I want. Lots of trial and error went into a few discarded attempts. Finally I was somewhat happy with this finished one. I love the buttery softness of the paintstiks and once I got a little more familiar with how much to lay down for a base layer, I was very happy with how they blended together.

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:

Here was my original sketch:

So we are now entering our third week of class and the videos were just posted. I watched them all this morning and am excited about yet another group of new techniques to mix with our paintings. Stay tuned for more to come.