iPad Pro (Day 11)

Welcome to Day 11 of my iPad Pro coverage. I took the entire day to focus on one portrait instead of doing a few smaller projects like the previous days. My goal was to try some new tools with this portrait to stay outside of my comfort zone. 

I’m still using Procreate for these exercises for the time being. In the last post I left off on the color mapping stage. That refers to me creating a series of shapes that tell me where the colors are going to go. After that I block in all of the digital paint. 

For that step I used the “oil paint” brush. What I like is with the Apple Pencil turned on the paint will “dry out” when a stroke is finished. There’s also a brushy look to it that takes me back to my studio painting classes. I always create multiple copies of a painting (especially portraits) because of how long they take. 

With 256 GBs of storage on this iPad Pro storage is a non issue. This iPad primarily has exclusively painting programs so I have as much space as I need to keep paintings within the app. If I ever run out (which I would really have to work at.) I simply upload my work to Dropbox. 

This can be done from Procreate and you can export as a Procreate, PSD, JPG or PNG file. Back to the actual painting. After blocking in the face and hair it’s time to blend. Speaking of which that was another area I experimented. In a previous post I mentioned blending with the Pencil and utilizing pressure sensitivity to blend was unsuccessful. 

Either it was too much (resulting in a sand blasted look) or not powerful enough. I went back to my old method of blending with my fingers and manually adjusting the opacity slider. The tool I used was the wet acrylic tool. I love painting with the oil brush but it was too rough to blend the subject’s smooth skin. 

After the face I worked on hair. I was going for a painterly look so I used the oils in short fast strokes and blended with the acrylics. I never paint a million strands of hair for portraits. There’s an underpainting with strands painting in on top for volume. This creates depth and sheen. 

Lastly I painted in some skin texture and made it transparent so it’s not overwhelming. Check out the process below and check back tomorrow for the next installment.

Copyright © 2018, Raheem Nelson. All rights reserved.
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