PROCESS: The ruins of old // sfw

download the process pack for this painting below: 21 pngs + 1 gif.

21 pngs is a record for me (i find that i usually end up with 15-ish progress shots) and i almost left out a few of the steps between 02-12, but i figured i'd rather keep too many progress shots than too few. this way you can really see how i go about painting the background, which is really the focus of this process pack, just as it was the focus of the painting itself. like i mentioned in the description of the finished piece, i want to practice drawing backgrounds more - especially architecture and interiors. i love drawing nature views, especially forests, but i'm not as well versed with buildings and interior views, so i want to work on that this year.

for this particular image i aimed for a speedpainty vibe rather than a polished and precise look. i could absolutely have spent way more time on the background, refining and detailing it, but that wasn't really the point; it was more of a warm-up, i guess, getting myself used to the idea of spending more time on backgrounds and brushing up on ye olde perspective basics. i actually find it quite fun to map out the basic perspective guidelines and then slowly see it turn into an actual ... thing, rather than just a jumble of lines. 

painting this also entailed a good learning experience with respect to creating a sense of depth - saturating the foreground elements, fading the background, making the characters stand out from the background by keeping them saturated + adding a blueish hue to samuel's wings, making them easily distinguishable from the warm colours of the rest of the image. i want to learn more about working with values, too - i should probably do some greyscale pictures for that purpose...

all in all i'm super happy with how this experiment turned out, and i look forward to making a little series of images featuring samuel and isaac travelling the ancient world - a grand tour, if you will. where should they go next? the colosseum? a norman church? the ancient theatre of syracuse? knossos?

// art + photo + samuel © me; isaac © kubi.