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Painting Towns, Frogs and Faces – My Process Videos & Brushes
🕑 Added 2025-07-04 15:36:11 +0000 UTCHey everyone, here are some thoughts about my latest processes.
Frog
I really liked this reference, but once I painted it, I quite stopped liking it. I noticed I wasn’t able to capture the wide range of colors the frog had in an accurate way. Perhaps you might find the similarities, but I think I did a downgrade of the reference. Nevertheless, I tried to create an interesting shape interpretation of the overall silhouette and the highlights. When I paint, I’m positive about my execution approach, but I can’t always guess how long it will take me to catch that “thing” that interested me in the reference in the first place. It’s often the case that I pay attention to one or two things, but it’s after I finish that I feel I understand what I was attracted to, at least enough for me to put it into words here.
Lotus
I loved the beauty and simplicity of this picture. I guess the contrast created by the light on the plant surface and how subtle the tones in the background had brown and blue. When you are starting your journey into improving your painting skills, pick pictures in which the light behaves differently on the same surface of the material. While painting, you start to notice these slight changes of value tones as well as colors. In the process, once you have chosen to represent that spot of your painting with several values and colors, try to guess one color or one value that allows you to match all those variations into one. This is what I recommend when simplifying reality so you can shape your style.
Blue Boots
I must apologize because I thought I hit the record button at the beginning of the process, but I didn’t. Therefore, the process video of this practice started once a big part of the job was done. Nevertheless, the execution had the same structure as most of my paintings. What I did change in this practice was the shape silhouette, aiming to make more straight lines than curved ones in order to have a sharper and rougher view, a bit more aggressive as well. To match the drawing, I also used my hard edge brush “Limberto - Hard Shapes” to paint not only shadows but as much as I could. The trick for rendering these kinds of materials is the combination of soft edges for most shadows and hard edges for most highlights.
Pickle
I decided to paint this vegetable as a warm-up, keeping things simple and light at the beginning of the session. Yet I kept adding more and more information. I guess this is a good way to approach big challenges in general: if you want to kickstart your process right away, pick the silliest piece of the whole goal and start from there.
Orange Town
Three things this picture had that were a yes for me: its perspective slightly distorted, the values, particularly the shadow shape, and the colors. Something useful to take out of this practice is the small value treatment I did. I chose to have the brightest spot in the whole composition right next to the brown door, turning the rest of the values in other parts of the reference a bit darker. This mostly happened by accident after I added some shadows to that door. I quite liked its look, and in order to push more attention there, I increased the contrast so nothing else around would compete.
Portrait
I felt tempted not to add any colors or values to this practice. The line art by itself was good for me. I quite liked it. But it’s also the case that if I like the drawing, there is a great chance I’ll like the whole artwork more when adding more information on top. However, I feel it wasn’t the case this time. I felt less was more, yet I still tried to create that volume through strokes. To some degree, I really disliked the practice. It felt like a filter on top. That’s why I spent a big part of the process searching for something that pleased me. Eventually, I did to some degree, but I think leaving this as line art could have been a better idea.
Process Video: https://youtu.be/91-K7jtlBQM
Brushes: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wHu8wuEHjDk-VfnZqv8iy8rwnvu8Ngmj?usp=sharing
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https://rebrand.ly/The-Art-of-RamonN90
Please let me know if you have any questions—I’ll be happy to help with art advice or book details.
