Seren

It took a long time for me to get the hang of digital painting, and I still have a lot to learn. This portrait of Seren is one of the first digital paintings I did. It dates to 2009. This is all on one layer because I still didn’t get the hang of layers back then.

I had a digital art job published in “Tori Amos: Comic Book Tattoo” in 2008, but carving out time to practice was rough, since I was usually so busy with my assignments I could go months without making any computer art. I’d forget everything I’d already learned. I did the “Tori” job in layers, but very little of the actual painting was done in Photoshop: mostly I just layered analog art together in a kind of collage.

It also took me awhile to get the hang of drawing digitally, and I think this is one of the first pieces I tried doing entirely on computer. I quite like how the skin and eyes turned out. Digital art can be too flat and animation-looking, with big, thick opaque color effects. Sometimes it looks great, but sometimes I want a classic, glazed look to the color.