Friday 23 September 2011

20 days in...

Well technically 22 but anyway.. heres the first 20 random portraits from the 100 volunteers. Thank you all again, hopefully this will all look pretty cool when its all collected together! As i said in my previous post- im picking one person per day by generating a random number from 0-100 but in the grid they run day one top left, left to right, row by row. I also mentioned that so far i havent been able to get these under and hour, one or two have come very close but for the most part theyre taking 1.15-1.25 or so, its not something im going to stress about- i would rather each came out like this than really roughly blocked in. Look out for the next 20!



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Thursday 8 September 2011

A week later...

Well, a week later and i have 7 portraits, so far it seems to be working as planned (dont know how i will feel about it 50 in of course). As its a week to the day that i took the ref photos, i just wanted to do a quick post to show the sort of thing im doing- not exactly a process break down, just a couple of quick photos that i took yesterday which shows a little progression on one piece.

As some of you may know, i generally use Painter IX.5 for my more painterly pieces but as these are relatively quick and dont need to be finished to a high standard- im using Photoshop CS2. Before i started all of this i created a brush library consisting of Photoshop brushes that had a real textured feel. I either made them myself or found them online (ive amassed quite a large collection of custom PS and Painter brushes over the years) and my custom brush library for this project consists of about 20 different brushes, so far i think ive used about 9 or 10 of them to get the effects i wanted.

In order to get an accurate likeness to my ref photo i have the ref on the left and the work document on the right and utilize Photoshops handy grid overlay to quickly block in the main areas of light and shadow and develop the general form. I really wanted each piece to only take one hour, but so far its more like 1.20 or so to produce a reasonable portrait, hopefully i will get a bit quicker as time goes on! Heres a few quick IG shots i took of the screen as i produced portrait no6 yesterday.





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Thursday 1 September 2011

Photoshoot done!...

A big thank you to all the 100 that we managed to get through the doors at Fine Art Print Company in Bath today. We managed to start a little before noon and continued till about 5pm, shooting a single reference photograph for the 100 that either turned up after hearing about the project via twitter, facebook, seeing the flyers around town or were effectively coerced when they were walking past the shop! I have to say it was a pretty eye opening experience trying to persuade passers-by to come in and have their photo taken for the purposes of creating a portrait painting- fortunately only a couple looked genuinely scared and refused to participate!

So now the fun part begins, im going to be randomly picking a number 1-100 every day and seeing what i can produce in my alloted single hours worth of painting time! After 20 or so are done i will group them together and post them up here so that all my subjects can see how things are progressing. Hopefully at the end of 100 im going to have something pretty cool!

Heres is a couple of Instagram pics, the first is the signatures of the 100 volunteers, which in itself is great to see. The second is a screen grab of a few of the shots i took today, its amazing to see all these portrait refs lined up like this!

So, thank you all again, check back in a short while to see how things are progressing!




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