Portraits

I did another portrait as a wedding gift for some friends. One is a comic artist, and the other enjoys herpetology, so I thought this would be cute. (It's kind of creepy, but still cute)

Ssh, if you know who they are. I'm intending not to have Google pick this up for keywords.

I'll admit I'm not thrilled with my ability to capture his likeness as well as I'd hoped. I'm blaming it on poor photo references -- as it was meant to be a surprise, I wasn't going to stop by his place and demand to take some well lit photos of him on short notice (and he keeps a low internet profile imagewise). Luckily I found some helpful ones for her, and think I did a reasonable job. I'm really pleased with how it turned out overall.

Once my friends start catching on that this might happen when they get married, I won't feel like I'm spoiling the surprise to ask for some photos ahead of time. Having a good reference really helps a lot.

My roomates got married last Saturday, and I wanted to give them something as a wedding gift. I had been to a wedding a few years ago at which someone had given the bride and groom a portrait, and realized that this was a good idea to pursue myself. I spent most of Monday last week painting, with a bit of touchup Tuesday and Wednesday nights. I'm fairly pleased with the turnout. Their proportions feel slightly off, and my likeness of DM is a bit lacking from not having enough photo references available on short planning. I had a lot of fun doing it, and hope to do more in the future. I think it's okay that it kind of looks like a cheesy romance novel cover. Somehow it works for them, and they didn't seem to mind.

...Which was sort of what I was going for. Mostly 'cause I was mainly intending to brush up on my portrait skills and not my background-making-up skills (I'm working on another painting for that, but it's a secret and you won't see it til it's done).

This one's not completed yet. I want to put in another couple hours deepening the shadows in the skin and shirt (currently the glasses stand out way too much by being the darkest lines), and bringing in more hair detail.