The Cat Pea Technique: The Digital Portrait Experiment Is A Success

I was getting around to painting my favorite gym photo,
but I still had a problem with painting eyes.

So I felt like I needed one more practice test,
I remembered "Reddit Gets Drawn" from my days of I will never draw like that...

And while I am not a fan of social media,
there was a photo with good eyes I could practice on.

I am sure the internet stranger I painted,
will like it.

This was a very fun, but also exhausting challenge,
it probably took six or eight hours, and I had to get everything perfect in a single sitting.

The color palette approach, that I am just going to call Cat Pea Technique,
to keep things simple, worked flawlessly.

I did pre-process the image in GIMP,
enraging the eyes, making the mouth smaller, and above all to get a preview.

It was a very rough sketch,
it took 10 minutes, it had double eyebrows, things were overlapping...

But it was perfect,
it delivered, a preview, a rough outline of where the eyes, nose, ear, lips need to be; and of course; the color map.

You just can't go wrong,
when you already have everything as you start painting.

You know something, I did not outline things,
in the beginning, like in that ancient video from 1995 that I remember so vividly.

The person just did big blobs of paint,
I think they were using a reference image over the entire canvas.

I suspect everyone maybe doing it,
I wish this was more well known.

It is so sad that there are people out there,
who tried digital painting, and gave up, because they didn't know to stretch the reference image over the entire canvas.

Both for color,
and proportions.

I did solve the eye problem, I was stylizing them too much,
I can't just cut out a circle to make an iris - I needed to do it freehand, with an airbrush, like a landscape.

The uncanny valley effect was caused by perfection in the eyes,
paintings are meant to be flawed.

You can see the perfect imperfections in the final image,
that I linked to in my Reddit Gets Drawn post.

Finally, this also marks my first Time-lapse painting video,
this was on my todo since I was a teenager.

You can do this too, Art is for all now,
we are all artists.

You don't need hand eye coordination,
you don't need to use grids, just stretch out the reference image over your entire canvas, and set opacity to 50% and start painting.

Once you get all the big blobs of paint in,
once you have your eyes, iris, eyelids, nose highlights and nose holes, upper lip, the dividing shadow, lower lip.

Once you stop needing positioning information,
then drop the opacity of your reference image to 1%.

At 1% it is invisible to you,
but it will still respond to your color picker.

So as you do eyelid details, you just click the color picker in an era that feel wrong to you,
and you will get the color from the reference image - you will get the color that you should use for that spot.

I wish you didn't have to get a Pen and Tablet,
because $40 bucks is still $40 bucks.

But the pressure sensor at the tip of the pen,
will let you slowly apply the color.

The mouse will just dump it in there,
but if you press gently with the pen, you will slowly apply the color - that is the painting part.

This is also why it is not paint by number,
because you are still using your heart, stylizing how much color you want in there.

Once you have the tablet and pen,
Krita the professional painting program is free.

And it does represent a job,
you are training yourself how to be a graphic designer, digital artist.

If art call to you, begin taking Krita Tutorials as soon as you order the tablet,
it is not a very difficult program - you only use five key combinations, if even that, mostly brush, eraser, merge layer.

Digital painting is for all, it loves all, but don't use a mouse, get a cheap pen and tablet,
and times have changed, technology made it so, that we are all artists now.

The entry barrier of shape and color,
that kept so many of us away, has fallen now - you are an artist.