I recently finished another painting commissioned as a gift for the client’s spouse. It is based on the scriptural quotation “how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings…”
The process was the same pretty standard thing I’ve described before. A few interesting things though:
- I ended up combining 10 different photos to get a single reference image—chickens are not good at following modeling direction, so 4 of the 10 photos were just different parts of the main chicken that I had to composite the get the pose we needed.
- Chicken faces look like scary dinosaurs. You can see between the last progress and the final that I altered the chickens face to make it slightly less scary.
- Ipads do not record reliably accurate color in their photos (I imagine this is true for most mobile devices). All the progress photos were taken on my ipad. Though I did do a little glazing that softened some of the colors, that doesn’t account for the huge difference color-wise between the photo of the final, which was matched to the original, and the last progress shot.