Started with Color - Ended with Sadness

After much hesitation, I readdressed this painting. I did plenty of anatomy studies in my sketchbook and this is where I got. Next, I'll apply color in several different ways in hopes of finding an understanding of how to use color. It is something I constantly struggle with.

This painting frustrated me. I tried slapping colors down from the get go like I had done with the sci fi character but something wasn't meshing very well and it did not come together. I gave up after 2 hours of endlessly painting with no progress. Meh!

Just Some Practice

Painted this in one hour. I googled some reference to help me with the expression. I've been getting back to basics some since I tried drawing an eye the other day and it looked awful. I struggle with the nuances of the face. I'm happy enough with the result here but mouth is not entirely proportionate to the reference. I'm planning on doing a painting tutorial in the near future and I want to paint some type of brawl between a tough female character and some thugs or something.

Realistic Character Concept Art v2.0

This idea has under gone several renditions. Here are a few of the looks that I liked while coming up with this idea. This is a second attempt at the sci fi character from earlier in this blog (scroll down). This time around I hit my original idea head on. I'm happy with it and most of the time I invested in this was not painting or fixing mistakes, but deciding which ideas I wanted to make sure I added. For example, the led lights, the super shiny clean finish metallic material, plenty of light effects, and a very clean hi-tech appearance.

Right now, I don't know what the do with the right arm. Should he be holding a gun or some kind of weapon? Maybe hes reaching out to the viewer with one arm and holding the data cube (just made that up) in the other hand? So far, I've spent about 8 hours time painting this.

 

Here is a material test shot I made with the mental ray car paint shader. I wanted to create a shader that would match the metallic qualities of the suit in the painting.

Let me know your thoughts, if you have any. Thanks.