Exclusive Limited Edition Artwork

How I created this Limited Edition Artwork – “Melancholia, passion and serenity”

Sometimes my work leads me down a path I hadn’t expected. This piece started life as a practice for freehand portraits, using a stock model I started creating an outline of the key areas (yes tracing the shape of the portrait photo, you have to start somewhere!). Firstly I selected a stock image from Envarto Elements and opened it up in Photoshop CC. I dropped the image on a canvas (600mm wide by 840mm tall) and set a white background layer to fill in the transparent areas, for what I had in mind for this exercise I didn’t need to worry about extracting the model.

So, I firstly I made a few tweaks to the brightness using a Curves adjustment, then duplicated a merged layer and set that to Exclusion at 64% to generate a clear image of the different main areas of the image. I had it in my mind if I could see the main shapes then I could understand the sketching process a little better. I then placed a solid black layer over this set to Colour, and I had my “practice template”.

From here I selected a Round point low bristle Wet Media brush and using white I started to get a feel for drawing using a Wacom pen. I used short staggered strokes sketching slowly and following the contours of the body and adding in small areas where there were subtle changes in light and shadow.

This left me with 8 separate layers with key areas from the Main outline throough to the eyes nose mouth and hair.

The initial image although rewarding and fairly pleasing to look at was basic and lacking life. At this point I nearly hit the delete button and stated again

However, my Muse kept nagging, “Don’t Stop Now!”, so I ploughed on. The shading next I thought but wait a sec, I really don’t like the idea of plain black and white I need colour and passion which was totally lacking so far.

So I decided to split up the canvas into 4 sections and colourise each of them so I dropped in a triangle design and left it over the main image as a reminder of what was bubbling around in my mind (colours textures emotion clashing together but bound into one!).

I dropped into creative mode and played with the Pen tool and brushes dropping mismatched colours over the areas of light and dark on the photo and blurring / blending them together. The words “keep going, you are nearly there” kept running round my head (no Im not totally crazy, not totally really!).

By now I was a few hours in and it was just after midnight so I start to save and shutdown when I decide its time to start adding some colour.

Using the overlay image I created earlier I create 4 paths and select 4 colours, each based on a specific emotion or feeling, erotic, cold and businesslike strong and passionate and soft and feminine. I could “see where I was going” now, I had n image of the finished work in my mind so it was just before 1am and definitely time to head to bed.

Late nights and early mornings are par for the course for me at the moment, as I have an inflamed rotator cuff in my left shoulder and it hurts like a, well it hurts and keeps me awake a lot. Enough of that sob story, onward!

Sunday morning was spent creating workpaths and selections, filling them and softening the edges and adding colours to the outline sketch that matched the 4 triangles. Yes it looked a total mess and yes I was tempted to stop but NO, I had the image in my head now and although this was meant to be a weekend of practice it had turned into a mission that I had to complete!

Brush stroke after brush stroke when in until I felt I was close and ready for the first of two textures. Dropping this over everything I resized it a little so there was a line leading from the bottom and pointing towards here left eye.

This was quickly followed by a few tweaks using the Camera Raw filter and a little S Curve adjustment to make it pop a little more.

With the final touches being applied and the a lot of smudging strokes being added to the straight edges I finally sat back and smiled. She was finished and ready to be shown to the word.

Grab your copy today, dont miss out on your chance to own a copy of this very special pice of art. It is available as a 84cmx60cm print but can be made up to 250cm. So either hit that buy it button or drop me an email if you want a super sized version!