Of late I’ve found myself to be very busy and have very little time. With that in mind I’ve been working on improving my speed painting. I’m approaching this process in three steps. Step one is doing single character speed painting with a focus on keeping each step of the process as tight as possible.
This is a speed painting I did a couple weeks ago that took me about two hours from concept to completion. I like the idea but I didn’t get a chance to refine it as much as I wanted to.
Given the same time period, here is a speed painting finished last night.
I was able to get a much more finished looking piece by making some slight edits to my process. The first step was to spend more time concentrating on the silhouette. Even though I’m still sketching the character out in a construction style I’m blurring my eyes and looking at the over all shape. I’ve been doing quick silhouette studies through out the week to practice looking for shape of the positive and negative space.
And secondly, I’m forcing my self to use a larger brush then I want to! I let myself make larger shapes and concentrate on getting the tone relationships in and then moving to a smaller brush as I get into the detail areas.
The next step in this series of studies is to apply the silhouette study style I’ve been working on to designing an entire composition and not just a character. And the final step is to bring togeather the first two steps to increase the efficiency of speed painting full scenes at higher quality and in turn allowing me to increase the speed and quality of the paintings I spend more time on.