Digital Painting #10

Painting #10 was a big accomplishment. I’m at around 1.5 years into my painting journey at this point, and I’ve made pretty decent progress when you compare them against each other. For this piece I wanted to go big or go home. In January I had the idea of making something for my brother’s birthday, which is the end of March, leaving me a solid three months to push myself. My brother was on board with the idea and requested a forest scene. Before I ramble too much more, here’s the finished piece.

I decided to try going for a three-piece triptych, and Eric gave me some ideas on what he’d like incorporated. I wanted to convey a sense of calm and the slow inevitability of nature. I thought a moldering statue was the perfect candidate to carry the piece’s name, “Repose”. Though the image was painted as a single, contiguous item it is being printed onto three 20”x30” vertical canvas boards. The total length on a wall will be 60” (plus the space between them). “Repose” took me three months of off-and-on work, clocking in at around 35+ hours. Maybe more, it’s hard to track over that length of time.

Overall I’m fairly happy with the outcome, but I know I need a lot of work on faces (and anatomy in general). One of the big achievements of this piece was that I didn’t use the Smudge tool at all - something that’s been really hard to do as an amateur. Another part I really enjoyed was getting the atmospheric background the way I wanted - it just kind of happened, and is a quality I think I’d like to continue to incorporate into future pieces.