My Corel Painter Picture

I should stress from the start, that I am not an artist! I love webdesign, put me in front of code and I’m a happy girl. I also love art, but I’m not really that talented. My younger sister is the artist of the family (proud to say she just had her first public exhibition of her artwork!!!), but I’ve always loved playing around in Photoshop, just usually not with fantastic results.

So I started doing a Corel Painter course that we were offering at work, really just to find out a bit more about Painter, and because it was using the Wacom tablets which I absolutely adore adore (If anyone loves me enough to buy one – cos I’m poor and can’t afford one – then I’d love you forever and ever). So I started doing the course and I have pretty much struggled with it all because as I said I am not very artistically talented.

On the final night of the course we were given our last piece to do. Take a photograph and using it as a reference only, re-create it using whichever medium we wished (I chose to use the Oil brushes and Blenders). This is a very labour intensive project and I’m not even halfway through, but for once something that I am creating in Painter is working out and I’m quite proud of it so I am posting it up here for everyone to see. Hopefully knowing it’s up here half finished will get me working harder to finish it off. Any comments good or bad on how I can improve or finish or just to encourage would be greatly appreciated.

	This is the original image that was used. Original image size is 1469px wide by 2000px high.
	After doing a quick sketch to get the basic outline of the face I started picking colours out of the main picture and blotching it in. I know I know it looks pretty messy and disgusting right now.
	With all the basic colours in place, I started blending them all together to get the basic look happening. It was about this time that I realised I used the wrong brown colour on her face. I’m still too nervous to change it to more of a fleshy pink.
	Still blending and now adding in a bit of shadow below her chin. Have started defining the eye a little.
	I realise that this doesn’t look much different from the previous picture, but when you look at the two up close you can see that the eye has more detail now. And that is pretty much the only differences between the two, now I’m really just starting to define that eye.
	And again with the eye. I am now obsessed by eyes. It’s amazing what a bit of eyeliner does. I haven’t put her eyelashes in yet, as I said, this is definately a work in progress.  Once I have finished her eye, I am going to start tackling her nose. It’s a little dark for my liking at the moment. Then her lips, then her hair…… God I’m never going to finish this am I?