Hi everyone. Here is my attempt at the intermediate and advanced challenges. I tried to keep the details to a minimum when changing the light source on the portrait, but rendering the hair was a huge obstacle for me. I think it still looks muddy where the light hits above her left eye socket (the right eye socket from our perspective).

Definitely the hardest lesson of the course. Backgrounds aren't something I think about or practice at all, so this was a struggle. With that said, I'm happy with the result I ended up with, and like always I can't wait to keep practicing and eventually compare my future work to this to see my progress. The lighting setup I was going for here was an overcast day, so I tried to keep my cast shadows to a minimum and put more focus on softer form shadows. Overall I didn't end up changing too much from the original figure painting. In the end I think the contrast between the figure and the background might be too much, and it doesn't help that the background is more textured and painterly while the figure is clear and crisp. It was a fun study though. Looking forward to continuing this course! Thanks again Jon.

Very late on this one lol. Regardless, I enjoyed using this process. Like a lot of other people it was confusing at first to try and understand occlusion shadows, especially deciding what was an occlusion shadow and what supposedly wasn't. Eventually I had to set some hard rules for myself and stick to them to avoid getting too carried away. Another huge problem for me was trying to keep my values in line throughout the whole process. I'm looking at my image in grayscale as I write this and hoping I did a good enough job. Finally, I had some issues blending my sketch and painting together, and for a large part of my process I had the sketch sitting on top of my painting unblended. Even as I moved on to the actual painting part, I wasn't exactly sure how to incorporate the two together. I'm excited to keep trying this method though. My brain needs some sort of process to follow in order to get the best results, so I'm going to keep trying this again and again to hopefully work out my issues and problems. This was overall a great baseline and Jon explained things very well. Thanks Jon.

Here is my attempt. Landscape painting is definitely not my forte, but hey—that means I can only get better from here, right? A lot of what I don't like about this painting is probably the brushwork, as I still have a lot to learn when it comes to merging shapes and shape design in general. Balancing the colors was also a bit of a challenge, because I kept going back and forth between a cooler palette and a warmer one. Overall, I'm just excited to get back to drawing and painting figures.

Here is my attempt! I wanted to make my painting to have a sickly/toxic feel to it. To do that, I used a colder green light and warmer reddish shadows. I'm happy with what I came up with, but I just hope that my colors aren't too reminiscent of Christmas because of the red+green color palette and the white fur trim on her clothes.

It took me some time but here is my attempt. It really does feel like magic to see a character come together after giving form to a flat drawing, especially when you have to trust both yourself and the process in the beginning stages (when things don't look so great). I will definitely return to keep using these techniques again and again, and the amount of potential seems huge.

Here is my attempt! I had a lot of fun doing this, but there were definitely some challenges that I had to overcome. I think I spent way too much time trying to figure out the reference in the first part of the assignment, as the cloak/fox pelt was really confusing for me to look at and decide what details to include/omit. Part 2 was my favorite, and I tried my best to make something that I thought was interesting. I've attached a screenshot of my layers for both versions, so you can see how my process works, I still think I can be more efficient with my layers and merge things down, which is what I tried to do more in Part 2. I also wondering if my values could use some improvement, so if anyone has some critique on that I'd love to hear it.

Finally done with these assignments! Here are my attempts.

Had a lot of fun on this one. Painting fabric became really interesting and even relaxing when I realized I didn't need to stress about getting every detail correct. Still couldn't nail her left eye to a degree that I was satisfied with, so I hastily put an eye patch on her and called it a day. I felt like I got what I needed out of this assignment anyway.

Here is my attempt. Using those textured oil brushes was definitely a challenge but it was a fun experiment, Looking back I could have spent more time blending the legs but I figured I could leave it at that because they're not so much in focus.