This is a Portrait I just finished for a Mitsubishi comercial. I had to finish it in two days, which meant I had to pull an all nighter, and still barely finished it on time. The reason I had to do it so fast is because they called me only four days before the shoot was to take place, and between the price agreements and figuring out what I would paint on it, I was left with two days to work on it.
The shoot was supposed to be this morning, hopefully everything turned out great. My friend RETNA got me this job. so I wanted to do a good job, eventhough he told me the portrait is supposed to be on the background and it wasn't really necessary to do full detail, once I got started I got all into it.Whenever I do a portrait, I usually start off with the face... sometimes it doesn't come out right on the first try because any little alteration on the features changes the face a lot, so when this happens, instead of trying to fix it I just start over and if the face is the only thing I have painted then it won't be so bad. Most times I get it right on the first try though, which was the case on this portrait.
The portrait is supposed to be a guy sitting in a throne holding some kind of lance and baton. I got a really good photo reference of the guy, however, I had to search for a photo of a throne. The first thing I do is project the image onto the canvas, I paint with transparent paints so I try to use light colored pencils because the pencil lines show through and are very hard to cover.Once I'm satisfied with the face it doesn't really matter what I do next, so I start painting the inside of the robe using first a base of orange followed by a crimson red, and giving it a silky look I then start painting the pants and tennis shoes.
I really liked how the pants stand out from the red, I think the red makes the blue stand out and give it a 3D look.
Here I am pretty close to being finished. So far I've worked on it about 16 hours with only a 5 hour break in between to get some sleep, so I am very tired by now. I couldn't find a good reference for the throne, so I just made up some armrests, trying to make it look good.Next are a couple of close-up shots once the painting was finished and a full shot of the painting. I really liked the way this turned out, especially the way the dark background makes the guy stand out.
