hello hello!!! in my newly enrolled art class, we're going to paint portraits!! Sounds fun! However, I have basically zero experience whatsoever on traditional oil painting, so I've decided to do a little bit of preparation before we begin the painting process by conducting a few studies digitally. Digital is obviously a different medium compared to real paints, but it's sufficient for teaching me the basic principles of painting,,, plus it's really fun!!! Here are some things I've learned: - most of these I went straight to painting without a sketch except for the orange slices since they had a weirder shape, but even then my sketch was very loose and was mainly just an outline of the silhouette with maybe some value guidelines here and there. - everyone knows obv but "draw what you see" plays a significant role in semi-realism. - you know pint refs are good when there's 60+ comments of people posting their own art studies loll. Really motivating plus you get to see how other's paint and learn from them. - MAKE A PALETTE PRIOR TO COLORING!! This really prevented my paintings from looking really muddy and.. bad. I just blotch out all the main colors I see on the ref, and only use those for the beginning stages. On a few of the pieces I kept the palette on screen. I ofc deviate a bit after plotting the basic shapes - start small; despite having thought I've done a pretty good job with the fruit, I still suck at human portraits :(( but the fruit still helps! So keep practicing fruit! :D - at this point I'm just jotting random stuff that pops into my head but uh- don't make up stuff. That colorful orange slice was inspired by those really colorful paintings I see on insta that look so yummy and whimsical and I wanted to give it a shot. I think it turned out ok-ish but for the most part, it's better to just rely on the reference solely, because most of the colors won't make any sense.. - choose a good reference.. for beginners choose one with hard shadows I think cause it's very easy to establish the values. These are of course only the works that went well. I'm very happy with them but unfortunately I can't paint them well every time :(( it takes me a few tries,, and don't get me started on human portraits. Ugh.
