A painting of Aftyn Rose being an outrageously sexy maid. I’ve amped up the sexiness a little bit in this rendition as a Christmas present to myself. So, um, yes. Moving along.
I have been doing some monochrome work with the Sinix brush set. While the wide dry brush has unlocked something in me for sketching, it makes highly streaky marks that scream “digital!” when trying to fill in spaces. You pretty much have to blend that out to get acceptable results. I’d been growing confident with the blending for most of a week, eventually producing this monochrome version of the painting above:
That was intended as a rough, but as I improved at the blending, I started liking it on its own and polished it enough to show. I remarked to a friend the process was like an earlier one, where I was alternating charcoal and eraser to massage values into shape.
I’ve complained about blending on here a lot, something that became a problem for me when I switched to Procreate. Krita has a single blend tool (with unconstrained shapes) that worked very intuitively for me, and it allowed me to really develop my approach to color in those early months. “What if I add a daub of yellow in?” I was mixing colors directly on the canvas, and building skill from parts. “This needs to be warmed up a bit.” “Too saturated; I need to mix in some gray.”
Procreate has as many blend tools as it has brushes, and there are settings that affect their behavior specifically in blend mode. The tools I tried out never worked the way I wanted, and I wound up spending a long, long time working around not having the blend tool available to me. The Sinix dry brush, though, just wouldn’t let me leave it alone. It’s a great sketch tool, but it’s awful as a blend tool. It acts more like a palette knife, scraping pigment from the canvas.
I tried out using my custom acrylic paint brush for blending, and that seemed to be worked much better. As I built up those shoulder sketches, I gained confidence in its usage. In the monochrome portrait, I think I developed it well enough to make finished pieces of art.
I then painted over top of that version to do the color version. At first I didn’t put together that the blending would work for color. But the Sinix dry brush would not let me avoid it. I started doing it, and it was like pushing wet paint around, much like blending in Krita. Suddenly I was able to massage colors into shape again! I am quite happy with the results. I think maybe I carried it a little too far in places, softening edges that should be sharp (for example: on the arms), but that’s a minor matter. Her arms are not the focus of this painting.
The other breakthrough here was that a decent percentage of this portrait is just me inventing things. There is reference, of course. But my sketch was loose enough that you really can’t make direct comparison for proportion, and I took it upon myself to erase our maid’s microphone and pasties. I was building up from anatomical lessons. Spinal cord should be like this, rib cage like this. That’s a sharp pivot to the pelvis! I’m sure a true reference would contain a variety of details I missed, but I don’t see anything unconvincing in it. It gives me a boost of confidence for getting into figures from imagination.
