I decided now is a great time to really develop better painting skills. To do so, I’m going to start off with painting a lot from black & white photo reference to try to improve my light, shadows, and values. I had always wanted to paint a ton of lovely portraits of 1940’s actresses, so I’m pretty excited so far. Eventually I’ll move back up to color, but I really want to peg the basics again, as well as finally level up my (in)ability to get the facial likeness down in the painting.

Also, I’m dropping Painter and focusing on painting in Photoshop for a while. I feel that Painter’s brushes let me cheat a bit too much, so it would be better for me to try this in Photoshop. Plus, all the cool concept art kids use PS, so I should figure out how. This tutorial explained how to set up my brushes properly– a problem that had kept me out of painting in Photoshop for years. Brush smoothing and spacing has changed my life. Hooray.

Today I started off using this reference of Vivien Leigh:

Rough (inaccurate) 10min sketch:

Final painting:

I know it’s not perfect compared to the original, but it’s kinda close. I lost track of how long this took. I think I started around 2pm? Maybe 3? Now it’s 10pm. I’m walking away from Photoshop for my own safety.