Digital Oil Painting: African Princess

When I checked my blog during the year-end/beginning post I realized that I have been posting almost exclusively photography. This is kind of funny because I haven't done much photography this past year but quite a bit of drawing and painting, both traditionally and digitally.

So, here I am now sharing one of those paintings.

Kind of fitting that I started this painting almost exactly one year ago. Sitting on a plane from Newark to Chicago for a meeting at our company's HO. I am a somewhat nervous flyer, so I usually don't do work-work on the plane. Painting on the other hand calms me down and puts my focus away from... flying.

As almost always I start with a 3000x3000 pixel transparent canvas, white or lightly colored background. Now that I think about it, I could should have added a textured background e.g. canvas or paper texture, hmmm, might still do that for the final pic.

Anyway, from the top left to the bottom right, the different pencil sketches go from pretty stylized to a more representational face (minus the pointy ears!) before I am mostly satisfied and ready to apply color. Usually, not always - it depends on how detailed I want to go with the painting - I will fill it all with gray so that I can add individual clipping masks for different colors, and parts of the painting thus preventing brush strokes from going astray and being able to adjust them individually. In the end, I will merge them all together and finish the painting on one layer.

The two bottom pictures are the final painting just with a different background and I definitely prefer the coral-colored one as it brings more harmony to the painting and makes it pop at the same time.

The whole painting process took 10:22:00 hours and 22528 strokes to complete - below you may watch a time-lapse of this process in only 3:39 minutes, if you like.

And here I added a texture to the painting using color burn as the blend moded, reduced opacity, and masked off even more of the texture on the princess. The blend mode shifts the whole picture's color towards red but I like it.

This is the final image. I hope you liked the process.

Till next time!

Have a great rest of your day!

Cheers,
(Ocean)Bee