painting

I've seen several very good tutorials and step by step things on how people do their painting, and I found it useful, so I thought I'd do one to give back in some way.  basically this is going to be a series of pictures as I go along.  possibly  when I'm done I'll spiff it up some.

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wood panel with stick cradle on the back keeping it flat.  also provides a nice place to hang the thing from.

the wood has a layer of plaster that I sanded flat, but then that's very absorbant, so I had to paint a bunch of layers of paint before it stopped soaking in. you can't do it contiguously (otherwise it starts dragging around wet paint/plaster), so to keep track of where the paint's been, I switch colors at each pass.

once there's a nice surface, painting in something appropriate for a ground color, mostly to cover up the weird camo look from the prior step.

here's the panel ready to paint on.

I like to have something to act as a model, in this case it's a boat in a boathouse.  since I don't really have access to those, I made my own model.  this is a small sailboat out of a chunk of wood and a chopstick and some string.

here's the floor of the boathouse gluing up.

there's the boat with some decorative paint.

boat in room.

painting the room to get correct light behavior.

almost done painting the boathouse...

a few shots playing around trying to get the basic composition and lens settings and so on.

once I got things about right, make a sketch onto the panel.

after some initial thinking/looking, I decided I needed a better model shot, this time I added smoke to the room and put a colored lens (safety glasses yellow) in front of one of the strobes).

colored in the rough sketch.  broadly colors for surfaces, to keep them differentiated more than as final color.

rough pass with black and white.

whiting over the windows on the back wall that I decided didn't look right.

redefined the edges

tweaked the edges so that they looked good to the eye.

a pass with a fine brush 

another fine brush pass

trying to start getting the tones and color right.

balancing out the tones and light levels.  screwed up a few areas, adding detail here and there.

put some color on the floor and developed the light behavior further (sort of ray tracing in my head).

lotta time just doing minor tweaks

another tweaking pass with black white and yellows.  to balance the tones.

adding in the foreground subjects