Artemis - Sketch & Flats

Had a super-busy work week, this week which slowed down my progress on the sketch for this one. But a quiet Saturday has given me plenty of time to conjure up some delicious outfits and also break the image into flats, ready for painting.

Artemis is a sister painting to The Entourage from earlier last month - I imagined the club in which that took place would have numerous rooms and locations filled with exotic characters, so I decided to see what might be going on in a balcony room overlooking that scene. I'm sure my next painting might be something more medically-themed (as those are so sexy and so much fun) but I like mixing things up and challenging myself as you're now probably aware.

One little thing about the sketch version - although I inked in my background lines with my regular sized brush I decided to see how things turned out if I used a thinner brush on my characters. I find in my process I save lots of time when I start painting with a tight, clean set of outlines - otherwise, I'll waste hours cleaning up the definition of the image during the painting anyway, so I might as well be a little more patient and get to a sharp set of lines first than rush ahead and regret it. This current line weight experiment is going to be an interesting one as part of the job of painting the piece involves diminishing the linework, painting over, erasing and integrating it into the piece in such a way that the lines still give the piece structure and create clean edges for all of the forms but without the painting looking like a piece of comic book art.  (Don't get me wrong there are a heap of illustrators out there that do amazing work with a comic style and I'm a big fan of guys that do that - it's just for me, for this project, I want to make these things look more like paintings.) Anyways, by going for a thinner line I'm going to see whether that speeds me along even more and gives me a better time in erasing those lines during the painting phase.

Hope everyone is safe, well and enjoying the weekend

Thanks all for getting behind me with your support, I'll post an update soon.