Sleepy kitten

Hell yeah!

This is a painting of Aftyn Rose, based on one of the most artistic of her Instagram photos. I have long wanted to do it, but hesitated due to confidence issues around the complicated lighting and shadows. But when I set out to work through my issues with painting brushes, a reference with distinct shadows was just the recipe.

I recently joined the Cara art community, and got inspired by the work of Nicolas Uribe, particularly this piece. I pulled it aside to study it. You see how most of the painting implies detail without actually providing it? Look at how few marks went into the hands and phone. But it totally reads in your mind, right? That’s the look I have been wanting to achieve, and set out to with this painting.

I have had good success with the pastel tools based on a brush pack I bought from Lane Brown. My goal has been to achieve similar successes with more painterly brushes — watercolor, gouache, acrylic, oil. Heretofore such efforts have been more miss than hit using the built-in Procreate brushes. After reading a bit about the options, I decided to experiment first with making my own. For this painting I made a variant of the built-in Tamar brush with tweaked opacity, dynamics, and stroke hue variability.

And you know what? I think it really worked! I’m excited about this piece! The rough strokes are good enough I gained the confidence to let them be and not blend them out of existence. The lower opacity and color variability let happy accidents occur, such as the lighting on the arm reaching out of frame. I worked without a sketch, just using big color shapes to guide my eye, and then gradually adding refinements to imply detail without getting worked up trying to replicate the whole reference. I focused detail just where I thought it was important, in her face and hand, and even there I let broad strokes guide me until quite near the end.

To me this feels like a big step toward achieving my painting goals, a sign I am making real progress. Yay!