Day 131: The Finished Mother’s Day Portrait with Process

I managed to finish yesterday’s Mother’s day portrait in a way that I’m at least a little bit more satisfied with.  I’m still not entirely happy with the results but I was racing against the clock a little bit and this is the best I could manage within my time constraints.  I mostly just added some detailing to the faces and clothes since yesterday’s WIP. 

I think the shading on the faces ended up looking a bit unnatural but there was only so much I could do with it.  I’m still struggling with mixing colours so I was having difficulty finding the right colours to layer together to create a more natural gradient.  Something to work on a bit more in the coming month.

I thought I’d show my process for this one again.  I think it’s fun to do for the slightly bigger projects.  Besides, I always end up taking pictures at various stages just in case I ruin it.  With this one I was especially worried about completely wrecking it because of how much trouble I was having with the colours.

This was the original line art that I started from.  I used a photograph and tried to plot out the proportions a bit.  I actually tried this one once before but I think I got it down a bit better this time.  The fact that I actually liked the line art for this one made me a lot more nervous about adding colours into the mix but I bit the bullet and did it anyway.

This was my first stage of the painting process.  I decided to just add an initial layer of colour over top of all of the white spaces.  That way I wouldn’t have any white in the painting any more to throw off my perception of the colours.  Also it would give me a rough indication of the overall look.  That was the theory anyway.  In practice I ended up being so shy about some of my colours that they turned out mostly white anyway.

Next was some basic detailing, mostly just on the hair, eyebrows and lips.  I waited until this stage to paint in the baby’s hair because it was much thinner and separated into individual strands or groups of strands which required a finer brush.  For the initial colour washes I was just using a broad brush so that I wouldn’t get distracted by details.  I also tried to do a little shading on the baby’s face but I wasn’t too happy with how it turned out.  This was the version posted yesterday.  I called it a night at this point because I was in danger of falling asleep on the painting otherwise.

Then this morning I went over it again and added some more detail, mostly just to the faces and clothes.  This is the finished painting, as above.  I didn’t make any changed to the background both due to lack of time and because I didn’t want to distract from the figures.  I think I could have done a bit better with the shading on the faces though and maybe the baby’s clothes as well.  Oh well, there’s always next time,