Fiber-optic Seer, a sci-fi female portrait

#1

Heya all, the forum stickies/suggestions seem to indicate more information is better, so I hope you can bear with me as I address my motivations and concerns.

I really wanted this piece to be a setting where the viewer is looking in on a very tranquil and calm environment, and a (hopefully) beautiful albeit unusual woman. At the start it was most important to me to play with color and mood over anything else. So I settled on this portrait:
((I used this wonderful stock photo for reference, http://fav.me/d11vt12 ))

I looked at it again later with fresh eyes and realized that while I feel I accomplished the exercise that I set out to do, it was little more than a portrait study with some unusual colors. So I decided to pull the camera back a bit and reveal more of what I envisioned the setting to be. At first I tried to really embellish the setting, lots of little techy details of a futuristic fiber optic forest and a lake of sorts, but it eventually became quite distracting and lost focus. Instead I cropped it way down and settled on this:

I was hoping to elicit a mood of soft tranquility in the presence of the unknown cold metal elements that are invading it/caging it; and that these small extra details would be enough to illustrate that without overpowering it.

Some of my concerns are:
Firstly, although I very much like the softness of the image there are certain details (like her eyes) that I’ve made too crisp to comfortably fit the looseness of the rest the painting. I hesitate rendering everything to that same level for fear of losing the mood of the piece, but I’m assuming making it feel more ‘painterly’ is not as simple as “just repaint the eyes using a bigger brush.” I’d really appreciate any thoughts on what to do here/what direction to take.
In the reverse, I’m a fan of her hair being a flat color. I like that it’s matte and almost graphic and makes her face really pop, but as I said above it might not fit as well as I like to think it does.
I’m also a little worried that I haven’t deviated from the reference enough to justify calling this an original piece. I’m relatively new to using some else’s stock photos as reference in my illustrations and I am unfamiliar with where that boundary is. If I have no model available for live ref or to take my own photo, I usually Frankenstein multiple pictures together from a reference board but I’ve seen Lunatique advise against that for all but the most advanced draftsman.

Any other thoughts, techniques, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

#2

It’s very possible to paint expressively and not have any kind of micro-detail like you do now, and still have a stunning image. Most accomplished painters in the tradition of John Singer Sargent don’t paint the kind of micro-details most CG guys are obsessed with, yet their work are light-years ahead in terms of artistic sensibility.

What’s more important is the way you manage the overall tonal composition, creating an interesting arrangement of values and colors at the macro level.

Take a look at these examples of master’s paintings–see how details are suggested and it’s the overall impression that’s more important:

http://jssgallery.org/Paintings/Lady_Agnew.htm

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Anders_Zorn_-_Mrs_Bacon.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/freeparking/522146851/

http://galleryone.com/Merchant5/graphics/00000001/pino-pinfi.jpg

http://www.lipking.com/recentwork_2.htm

And in the digital realm, if you look at the work of Jaime Jones and Craig Mullins, you’ll see that they too, focus more on the overall coherency of an image, and does not obsess over level of detail. And it’s no coincident that they too, are followers of the Sargent tradition.

Since you are concerned with consistency of detail vs. painterly, I think if you simply went for that Sargent tradition, you won’t have to worry about it any longer.

Other than your concern over level of detail, I think you might want to think more about the narrative behind the image, as well as the composition.

You said you wanted to " elicit a mood of soft tranquility in the presence of the unknown cold metal elements that are invading it/caging it," but what is the overall theme here? What is the point you’re trying to get across? Is it “imprisonment?” “spirituality vs. technology?” Is there an actual narrative or is it more surrealistic?

As for the composition, the large area of white is a bit contrasty against the rest of the image and doesn’t quite convey the softness you want. Usually if you want softness and tranquility, you’d have less contrast. And what exactly is happening in the image? What are those white petal-like things? What’s the pool she’s in?

What is your light source? According to the lighting on her skin, it looks like a pale, cool colored light source, but the background is deep pink. You also have bounced rim-light on her that’s the same deep pink, but the water in the pool isn’t of that color, so what is bouncing that deep pink onto her? It can’t be the walls around her because if so, we’d see the same deep pink bounced all over her, not just on her torso area.

I think the way you’re using the reference is fine–you’re not just blatantly copying it without any creative input. But as you said, not having proper reference is a problem, and when it’s a glaring one such as undefined shoulder/arm area, then you really need to address it. If you don’t have family or friends to model for you, you can always use yourself. A mirror or a camera on a tripod is all you need, and it won’t even matter if you are of the opposite sex, since plenty of artists model for their own work, and male artists often will put on dresses in order to model for their own paintings (if it’s necessary, or when they’re desperate). If you have such a drastically different body type, and you must have the model look as you envisioned, you can always hire a model–they don’t cost that much. Most figure drawing models are quite affordable by the hour–just contact a nearby art school or university with an art department as ask them where they get their models, or search online–there are often websites dedicated to local modelling needs.

#3

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.