Two weeks of everyday studying in one image:

More finished experimentation (steps):

Final result:

21 days later

More study images:

More finished experimentation (steps):

Not finished, but I moved on to another image:

14 days later

Trying the red/green color scheme:

Final result:

11 months later

Huh, what a year it was :cold_sweat: ...
Anyways, a recent new image - depiction of Lady Philosophy from Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. Painted in Krita with some final post-processing in GIMP. Unintentionally, she ended up having a ContraPoints-ish vibe, which I don’t think is a bad thing! :smile:
(YouTube - full painting process video)


Wah, your rendering is top-notch! Who are your main art parents/the people you ref the most?

Thanks! I look up to old-school academic painters as the standard of quality yet to be achieved someday :smile: (Bouguereau, Zorn, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, etc). Sites like "The Art Renewal Center" (their museum) are my goto place for inspiration.

Thank you! I've heard of 'Zorn primarily from his 'Zorn palette' and I really want to try it. (I've just noticed his 'blues' seem to be a little muted' ) How long did it take you to hone down this style? :relaxed: Never read the name 'Lawrence', but his work looks very familiar.

I would love to attend an atelier, but unfortunately they're only in the capital and way out of my budget. (Sad TARC got swindled so easily. :confused:)

"It’s a feature, not a bug!" ) It's his "trademark" realistic harmonious palette with a very limited gamut.

It took me a while, couple of years. But, my main training and education were in applied math and computer science. I studied drawing and painting alongside partial differential equations and C++ :sweat_smile:

+1, same for me

12 days later

Haha figured. I still hope there's a way for an audience to recognise a blue. I've seen a tutorial of the Zorn palette with coloured pencils, so it's nice to see it transferable to dry media. Ahh, it's good that you were able to learn art in your own time, whilst perusing something else professionally. I've been trying to draw for so long and part of me feels like it's 'Sunken Cost Fallacy' at this point, which is why despite doing it in my spare time, I'm glad I didn't chose it as a degree. Did linguistics, instead. Which swings and round about on that one. I still would love to learn how to code, tho!
Yeah, another reason I didn't study art at uni or enrol in an art school, is the teachers' are not people I want to be taught by. The ones that are are either in ateliers, really expensive American schools or online classes. So, I guess it's still the autodidact route for me

Not sure how do do that quote thing, to split up the response. Still a newbie.

Me too. I love and respect Academia, but visual art departments no longer teach painting the way they did a hundred years ago :disappointed: . I suppose it’s a good degree for those wanting to work in a gallery, and it might serve as a ticket into the contemporary art world (which is quite closed to outsiders).

On PC, select the text you want to quote and click the blue 'QUOTE REPLY' button that will appear.