Not Taking The Easy Route

I'll make a quick comment about the pseudo-velvet paintings that I'm working on at the moment. They're easy. There, I said it.

Making shading and texture is an easy technique to do with acrylic paints and when you couple it with the fact that the results can be quite striking it's a trap to avoid in excess. Sure, you can crank out a painting quickly and admire the results for hours. But at the end of the day, you haven't really extended yourself as a painter. Not to say that those tricks don't have their place. They do. Heck, I'll admit to loving the results that I've achieved so far. But if I'm honest with myself I wouldn't consider them to be groundbreaking in any way, or ones that I've put honest toil into.

When I put it like that, they sound like artistic junk food. Quick, easy and satisfying in small quantities.

So for that reason, the next painting I'll be tackling after completing the four "Lucha" pieces will be on the order of difficulty a few magnitudes higher. It sort of scares me, but I'm looking forward to it. These paintings have been a quick vacation, but the one I have planned to follow will really push my limits. It's going to be based off of a cut-scene from the original "Witcher" game. Now that game was one that I couldn't make it all the way through. The graphics were fine, but tended to be a little jumpy even when I turned down all the detail from the option screen. Also, it was one of those linear games where you seem to have a lot of variety on how you want to pursue the storyline, but in reality you don't. To get from point A to point B you have to kill 20 monsters. No more, no less. The 20th monster is a boss that looks really difficult to kill but is actually impossible to fail at defeating. You know the type. Yes, I'm looking at you King's Bounty. You too, Dragon Age.

But I did get as far as an entertaining cut-scene where the main characters blur out into soft focus and a rather humorous painting drifts lazily across the screen. One screen capture later and I grabbed it for my collection of potential painting subjects. The Witcher might not be the best game to immortalize on canvas, but that one image sure is!