The thread name was inspired by following exchange on #dswp:


(Well, not actually, but it's hard to remember what exact order these ideas appeared in.)

This is my first digital painting ev4r. Well, actually I have an unfinished previous version (as seen from the file name), based on a different picture, but that doesn't count. I'm not nearly happy with the result, but it still feels good; you know, for a first ever painting it doesn't look all that bad:-) And no, I haven't painted IRL at all, only drawn in graphite pencil. I started it on December 12th and finished less than half an hour ago; there were several weeks I didn't even open the file. The size of the image is chosen so that it would be usable as a wallpaper on any monitor, unless you have a really monstrous one (or several). You can cut off the edges for a 4:3 aspect ratio monitor, and scale it as needed; if you have trouble with something, ask me. I hereby declare this image being in public domain and allow everyone to copy and modify it freely. You could still keep my signature, though;-)

The reference photograph was http://www.123rf.com/photo_5518791_aggressive-boxing-girl.html. To see the shadows more clearly, I tweaked its brightness and contrast. Well, to be fair, I painted the draft directly onto the image; it's against good practice, but screw that, I wanted results. The search that turned up this picture was "aggressive girl", by the way. Skin tones were taken from http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_goTkiAWnZuU/SK-lyR26pOI/AAAAAAAAAZY/pVQt6Ysqhm4/s1600-h/dark+skin!!!.jpg (you notice the result is considerably different). Hair tones came from http://www.dphotonews.com/tutorials/brunette_blond.php (I figured that as the boxing girl was blonde, this diff image would help me in turning her into brunette). Hand was the hardest part, I did at least three different sketches and finally painted it on upscaled http://fotosa.ru/stock_photo/Westend61_RF/p_1710473.jpg. The pistol is a Desert Eagle; I used several photos to get the shape and colors right, but the specific ones aren't important.

It's quite amazing how easy it was to draw the mouth, that has at least three distinct components (lips, teeth and tongue), each one completely different from others. And how difficult it was to get the large surfaces right... Additionally, I could've placed her finger on the trigger guard (holding your finger on the trigger when you don't want to shoot is a bad idea), but this painting has been tricky enough already as it is.

<rant>

As a side note, I FUCKING HATE THE NEW GIMP! Basically everything that worked has been munged badly; some things can be fixed, some not. Like, why in the sweetest hell should I use move tool to move the content of the selection??? (Might sound weird to you, but believe me, it isn't necessary and wasn't in older versions.) Status bar has a retarded help message on it, telling you that you can, imagine that, paint with painting tools, select with selection tools, etc, so you can't see what layer you're on (only when you mouse over). Uninstalling this crud and installing an older version (2.2.*) took me, like, half a day, because something got b0rked (DLL hell) and I had to manually download shit and install and uninstall three different versions several times before I succeeded. Or something. Christ, is there a backup copy of the developers somewhere that we could restore?

Next time I install a new system, I will check very carefully whether my favorite applications have been fucked up while I wasn't looking. 2.2.17 appears to be the last decent version of GIMP; it doesn't do you in the face, and it fixes few annoying bugs from previous version (and introduces few new ones, of course). The next version, 2.4.0, started with this status bar spam.

</rant>

Anyway, here it is. Share and enjoy. The ZIP contains a full-size PNG, and an animated GIF showing the work in progress (the weird splotches on the image are to pick colors from when drawing; palette, basically). (I wanted to add the raw file, too, inflating the ZIP to 9 MB, but for some reason the upload got borked every time).

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Путін — хуйло

Beginner’s Guide to Urban Terror (woefully out of date)

Daily Deadnade (last updated September 9, 2016)

Your first painting?

cereal guy is so right

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Путін — хуйло

Beginner’s Guide to Urban Terror (woefully out of date)

Daily Deadnade (last updated September 9, 2016)

I was about to complement you on the pic, but now I'm gonna save it for whatever you are about to come up with after the most recent post :P

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"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
- Martin Golding

Well, I don't actually have any ideas yet (or more precisely, any ideas I'd dare to realize with my present skills).

So... I'm waiting. Don't be shy:-)

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Путін — хуйло

Beginner’s Guide to Urban Terror (woefully out of date)

Daily Deadnade (last updated September 9, 2016)

Wow, nice painting, looks really cool and realisitc! You made it completely in GIMP?

Wise words...

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Yup. Used a tablet, of course, otherwise it would've taken even more time and looked much worse (downloading the full-size version makes clear that it's not nearly as neat as the downscaled preview implicates).

Oh, and I forgot to link to some of the tutorials I read before starting this. (I hear we have few other tablet owners here, so a minor info dump wouldn't do any harm.) There are some very useful tips that you'll only really appreciate after seeing them in action (or after seeing how not using them fucks things up;-P). For example, using soft-edged brushes (Paintbrush instead of Pencil/Airbrush in GIMP) has been stated being a bad idea on several web pages; you'll understand why when your painting gets the more splotchier the more you apply paint. (I had to liberally use Smudge, which is another bad idea.) Take a look at this deliciously huge promotional art for Mirror's Edge: it's painted with hard-edged brushes, which make for sharp boundaries where needed, but still allow you to blend colors smoothly when set to very low opacity. (Another thing that comes out really well on this picture is using different colors, not just different brightness/saturation levels of the same color: shadows are purplish, while the translucent parts are orange.)

For the article that gave me the courage to try and actually paint something, see here. I suffered from inferiority complex, seeing how my few attempts at painting looked horrible, throwing them away after only fifteen minutes or so. And there's this guy, whose initial draft almost makes me puke, and you just look at the final result!!1!1!

Most of my knowledge came from the tutorials on Vinegaria's website (ugh, frames), especially the stuff concerning use of different colors on the same painting.

Hair is undisputably the trickiest part of any portrait; thanks to Linda Bergkvist I avoided lots of tedious work and got a reasonably good result, considering that I ignored most of her tutorial:-P

There were few other resources I can't remember right now, but the amount of information these gave was minute anyway.

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Путін — хуйло

Beginner’s Guide to Urban Terror (woefully out of date)

Daily Deadnade (last updated September 9, 2016)

Hey, you are ambitious and really into this topic. As a company I would hire you just because of your devotion to new topics
I downloaded ArtRage long time ago after seeing this video, but never produced anything showable...

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When looking through my unorganized photos, I found about a dozen of WIP shots from several pencil drawings.

I was quite happy about this one until I saw the reference pic again:-/ Most notably, I tend to get the proportions wrong, most of my portraits have disturbingly long horse faces.

Oh, what the hell, most people couldn't match this if their life depended on it:-)

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Путін — хуйло

Beginner’s Guide to Urban Terror (woefully out of date)

Daily Deadnade (last updated September 9, 2016)