An Introduction and Self-portrait (with process)

Here I am pictured with the prize of my 1886 expedition into the heart of darkest Africa in search of the elusive pygmy elephant, hitherto only a creature of whispered conjecture. This particularly wonderful specimen I named Sweetums because of her mild temperament. However I would urge caution should you ever, in the unlikely event, find yourself face to face with the bull of this species, though no larger than a medium sized dog, they are particularly aggressive. One of our guides had to have his leg amputated after his shin was badly gored. Sadly history seems to have forgotten my greatest discovery and since no further reports of this unique species have surfaced I am forced to believe they have gone extinct.

Wait? What? You don't believe me? Fine. I made it all up. I'm not a time traveler, not at all. Nope.

Hi, I'm @jcayne. I painted this self-portrait specifically for this introduction, as of right now it hasn't been posted anywhere else. If you're interested I will explain the process below, but for now I suppose a slightly more factual introduction is in order.

Pardon the expression, trying not to drop my phone.

These days I live in a little city in South Korea where I teach English at a local elementary school. I've been here about eight years. I spend too much time in coffee shops and on the weekends you can often find me enjoying a craft beer or two at my friend's brewery. I love geeky things, particularly comics and manga, animation of all sorts, novels with any kind of supernatural element, fighting games, and tabletop rpgs. Since I've been in Korea I've written two thirds of two different novels of my own, and suspect I might even finish them someday. A long time ago I had aspirations of being an professional illustrator, but life doesn't always take you in the direction you expect. Nowadays art has receded back to a sometimes hobby. In fact, it's been almost two years since I've done anything but doodle in the margin of a lesson plan.

So how did I wind up on Steemit? It's a bit of a long and convoluted story. I had typed it all out, but I ended up deleting it because it was long and convoluted. Let me try the short version. Something, something cryptocurrency, stumbled on Steemit, poked at it for a while trying to figure out what I could do it with it and if it was worth my time, discovered @steemitadventure, kept coming back to look at steemitadventure's work because it spoke to my geeky soul, and then I realized what I wanted to do with Steemit, make art again.

The plan is to post my work, some new, some old, and resteem artwork I like. So follow me if you want to see more of my work or work I think is cool.

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Alright, so let's talk process.

I began with a very vague concept of what I wanted to do, i.e. a self portrait with me wearing a Victorian suit and something involving a tiny elephant (this was kind of a call out to Heinrich Kley, an old school pen and ink artist I like, look him up). This first thing I did was go and collect a little bit of reference.

I used the picture of the Victorian gentleman with the amazing hair to get the basic shape of a the suit, but I stole idea a few ideas from other period images and made my own design. This reference picture was the linchpin of my painting when it came to lighting.

With just that to go on I fired up Krita, a very nifty free digital painting software and got to work. I drew directly into the program using a medium sized Intuos Creative tablet I bought a few years ago because I was getting tired of dealing with my old as dirt Intuos 2.

I like to draw on colored backgrounds on the computer, so I don't have all that white glaring back at me. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this, so I went with brown because it looks good for sketches and makes a nice base color for paintings. You can see I'm a pretty sloppy sketcher, even more so on the computer because I can draw just as much with the eraser as the brush, so I just end up pushing the lines around, almost like working clay.

At this point I had a decent likeness, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with the elephant as I hadn't really planned out my image ahead of time. So I opened google and searched for pictures of people holding cats and dogs, trying to find some inspiration. I had originally thought I might draw myself holding the miniature elephant up by the scruff of its neck, but that didn't really match the attitude of what I had already drawn. Eventually I stumbled onto a picture of Ben Affleck holding his dog and I thought the hand positions were interesting. It didn't take me long to realize I only had a sort of vague notion of what an elephant looked like so I had to google that as well. It's surprising difficult to find a picture of an an elephant on its back, so I had to improvise a bit.

I snuck a peek at couple African elephant heads, too, because I wanted to get a bit of that look and ended up with something of a hybrid, but that's fine, it's a made up species anyway. This image of an elephant served as the primary reference and was the genesis for most of the pachyderm related decisions made in the painting process.

Originally I wasn't intending to go much beyond this, I thought I might clean it up a little and make a nice sepia tone sketch with some white highlights, but on a whim I decided to paint it instead. So I started to lay down some low opacity color over my sketch.

I still wasn't sure what I was going to do with the image, so you can tell this is pretty tentative. After I was able to fix a basic idea of what it might look like in color into mind I decided to go ahead and commit to a full painting.

Starting with the areas I had the best idea of how the lighting to should be, i.e. the jacket, I started laying down more opaque layers of color. I work pretty much exclusively with a hard round brush with the opacity set to pressure sensitivity, or the size set the pressure sensitivity. The first helps me blend and find the colors I want and the second is good for detail, I predominantly use the former. Using these two bushes I just keep laying down more and more color the painting starts to feel solid and the drawing starts to disappear.

At this point I really need to start thinking about the lighting, the problem is none of the lighting in any of my reference images matches. You can see in my previous step I had blocked in a new lighting scheme for the elephant. And in this one you can see where I'm starting to test out how light might fall on the face. By the time I saved this capture of my progress I've already detailed the hands and the elephant, but light is what defines all that detail so I spend a fair amount of time trying to get everything to more or less match up

The face is the most important part of a portrait, if you nail it everything else can be kind of fuzzy and vague and the viewer's mind will fill it in. You all will have to tell me if I managed to do it. The tricky part here was to essentially reverse the lighting on the reference picture of myself. At one point I was reduced to feeling my own face to make sure I was getting the right shapes, and trying the make best guesses how the light would wrap around them. I was sitting in a coffee shop at the time, so I probably looked like an idiot.

You can see I made a little value scale for myself to make sure I hit everything, if you're going to be changing values back and forth a lot this is really helpful to do, rather than trying to find them again somewhere in your painting. Also, I used this layer of the painting to drop in a few remaining details, such as the buttons, vest, and bow tie.

When I started working on this picture I never intended to take it this far, but maybe I have a narcissistic streak or something. However, I had never really thought about a background. I briefly considered trying to paint in a jungle setting, but ended up deciding it would take away from the image (and my time), so I glanced through some old vintage photos and went with something in the style of several Victorian photos I saw.

This was one of the few areas I really took advantage of working digitally. I made a new layer, took a textured brush and painted over the whole image. Then I dropped the opacity of the layer down so I could see through it and erased the out the area of the figure. Since it's a pretty simple silhouette this wasn't much work. And that's that. Honestly I'm pretty happy with how it came out.

For better or worse, here is a close up of the face. While not perfectly realistic, I like how all the colors come together in the hair.

Here is a closer look at the elephant. On the head in particular I let a lot of the underpainting show through and sort of define things as little happy accidents. I combined elements of the Asian elephant and the African elephant to get something I liked.

Despite taking all that time to paint it in color, in the end I really struggled with whether I should convert it to black and white or not. It definitely looks more like an old photo.

I don't know which I like better, tell me what you think

Anyway, that's me. I'm really appreciative toward all of you for helping me get started on Steemit. If you liked this, then using any or all of the nice little buttons below would be amazing.

Cheers.

[Edit: There seems to be an issue with some of the images displaying red shifted, is there anyone that might know why this is?]