Last year, in January, I decided to try my hand on a more painterly style. I’ve always struggled with this and wanted to find better ways to approach it. So naturally I experimented a lot with portraits of some role playing characters me and my friends are playing in a campaign. This is what I did at the beginning of 2024:
It felt like I had come a long way from what I usually did in a painterly style, but the workflow was still a bit of a pain and the style ended up being very smudgey (which it was). In hindsight, it wouldn’t hurt to have a bit more texture on these.
After a year of drawing, I decided to try my hand on the characters again. On some, the looks changed a bit after some feedback, but I think the biggest win was that I found a better way for the workflow. Here are the characters in the same order as previously, almost a year later:
I also tried to mix hard and soft edges a bit more and make it look less smudgey. I think I still have a lot to learn, but I’m happy that I’ve advanced my painterly game a little more during the year 🙂
I also noticed the few times I worked with acrylics last year that my game seems to have evolved there as well, thanks to my digital training. Hopefully I can find the energy to experiment ore with acrylics and gouache this year – I did some stuff during the holidays, which I will post here later.
Leave a Reply