A slight expansion...

[telophase]

...on my previous post:

I'm taking a moment here to squee about the DVD tutorial I bought from Daniel Hammonds. He's a digital painter in the UK, and this video here is a speeded-up demo of a painting he did in Photoshop. The DVD tutorial contains the whole thing in real time, plus full commentary. I'm about halfway through watching it right now and can't wait to try the techniques. :)

And what he does is something I like - instead of copying the photo directly, he takes it and changes it a bit, emphasizing some aspects and changing the mood.

His site is here. You can buy the DVD directly, or pay a chunk less for the downloaded version, if you've got a fat pipe and can download 3 zip files that equal a bit over 3 gigs of data. The exchange rate is in my favor right now - I paid a little over $10 for the download, and consider it a bargain for what I'm learning.

Comments

[madame-manga.livejournal.com]

Interesting vid, especially the way he keeps flipping the pic left to right! It looks like a Renaissance-type glaze-over-grisaille technique all the way, only with no pesky drying times or secret formulas. :) I wish I could get my Wacom to talk to my Dell laptop...

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yup. I'm at the point where he's put a layer of color over it and is working on the details now. But as the video about the details is a full hours long, I only watched about 5 minutes of it last night before deciding I didn't need to spend EVEN MORE time watching that when I had a kitten that really wanted to play. XD

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

The demo in the linked video looks like he's working from a photo and hasn't corrected for the distortion that comes from parts of her head being closer to the lens, which the eye corrects for and shouldn't appear in a portrait. (Unless that's the look you're going for, but to me it looks ugly and like you're working from a photo ref without knowing what you're doing.) Other than THAT...wow. :) I only watched the first couple minutes, but I might have to look into buying the download.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

In the voiceover version he explains that he's going for a slightly weird look, so he changes some details and exaggerates some others. He doesn't mention the perspective specifically, but it adds to the effect he was talking about. No clue if it was deliberate or not, but I'm thinking yes. :)