Swing Song start & some digital art

I’ve been working on this painting a bit each day since January 5th although most of my art time has been spent learning Photoshop.  I started this out with a layer of texture made by the usual suspects [onion netting, carved rubber stamps, painting knife, punched ribbon, etc].  Then I did a layer of loose, wet acrylic.  Next I sat down with a coffee and stared at it from a distance [all four directions] and asked family what they saw in it.  Funnily enough they don’t even find this question strange anymore…  Kim and I “saw” a violinist at almost the same time – how fun that process is!  So, I’ve been working to develop that idea for the past couple of days. 

Here’s a photo of the painting as it is right now.  At this point I’ve just defined the skin by a layer of almost white.  It looks much bluer here for some reason.  Anyhow, I brought this photo into PSE 8.0 to experiment with my next steps.  I drew her facial features on one layer and  then added shadow and her bow on another layer.  I plan to use some tissue collage in part of the background.  Here’s how it looked after I puttered in PSE.

Just as soon as I see this small thumbnail I can see her jaw is quite large…  I’ll have to factor that in when I get to my painting again tomorrow.  Wish me luck!

Here’s the photoshop exercise I did today – DJ really has good taste in her subjects…  I really like this!  Cheers