Another Portrait

Here is a piece, 2 months in the making.  Obviously it didn’t take that long to actually paint this one, I just didn’t continuously work on it during these last 2 months.  And of course, things like work, friends, family, etc.  kept me from finishing this one quicker.
Sorry that I didn’t record this one.  It was actually a piece that I started at our draw night group here,  and I didn’t start out recording, so i decided not to record the rest of the process.

I think that the total time on this one was about 6 hours.  And the programs I used were the Gimp and Blender (for the weapon and background).

Some of the things I focused on in this piece were the detail in the face, some new shading techniques and the use of 3D to create objects in the scene.  Using a animated speckled brush in the Gimp allowed me to create smother transitions in skin tones, and at the same time, add texture to the skin.
Then for the background I wanted to create these basalt formations that our found in places like Iceland.  So using Blender, I quickly made a long hexagonal object, and basically duplicated it until I got the form of the background I wanted, and adjusted the lighting to match the lighting on the character.
The rendered image, out of Blender, doesn’t look much like what is in the final piece.  The reason for this is, that I wanted to draw the viewers eye to the character.  So by blurring and adding much more texture to the background I was able to create a depth of field effect in the painting that brings the focus to the character.  As you would do in photography.
I also used Blender to create a basic ax shape for the character to hold, and then painted the details on the ax in the Gimp.  Also adjusting the lighting on the weapon in gimp as well.

This was a great piece to work on.  Any comments or critiques are welcome.