The Dressing Room - Progress

I really dislike painting backgrounds.  I think it's because I'd be rather drawing princesses, beautiful sexy outfits and bizarre pieces of equipment.

But I want to create scenes and stories in my works and for myself it feels a bit of a personal cop out by just painting a character and putting in a wishy-washy background in as an afterthought. (Don't get me wrong, there are stacks of amazing artists out there that just paint characters and they produce incredible works, but to me, if I'm not painting a scene, I feel like I'm only doing half of the job.)

And, I want to get better at what I do, and the way to get better is to just knuckle down and do the difficult and annoying stuff until I get proficient at it.

So that's why I'm trying to include backgrounds in my works - to force myself to get better.  And, the side-effect of this means that I can create those stories - things and characters in the background that people can read more things into than just what's happening in the foreground.  (And I'm getting the sense that my followers are responding to that too.)

To that end, with 'The Dressing Room' I've decided to paint the background first - like eating my pizza crust I know that once I've got this mainly technical exercise out of the way it's going to be all cheese, meat and sauce from now on.

This piece is proving to be a really interesting technical challenge as I'm having to draw everything reflected, which includes all of the light and shadow in the scene - something I've never tried before.  I think I've just about pulled it off.  But no doubt as the painting progresses I'll go back in and make tweaks and adjustments.

As goes painting the damask patterned wallpaper (which I'm a big fan of, it always looks sumptuous, sophisticated and a little dark & sexy) I created a tiling pattern that I stretched and mapped to the walls, and then threw a number of filters and manually smudged and distorted afterwards.  That saved me time and prevented the pattern standing out from all of the natural brushstrokes in the rest of the painting (if any element ever looks like it stands out too much or is not in-style then I've failed to use my tools correctly.)

So that's where I'm at on the morning of Saturday 27 November.  I'm hoping a relatively quiet weekend allows me time to go in, paint the various masks and props that are on the cupboards and shelving, and then start on the main characters and the many different outfits (and attachments ;) R.O.M.) they may have.

Have a wonderful day

I'll post with another update soon