B I R D . O F . P R E Y

[EDIT] The photo that I used as reference I originally couldn't find a link too, but it looks like Vogue is putting out a hardcover book using the photo as the cover, you can see the original here:
[link]

Hold on to your hats folks...I'M POSTING ART!

I know...it's been...well...waaaaay too long D: forever and a day really. I hope you at least enjoy this new piece, the first personal art I've seen to completion in what feels like eons.

I've been working on this piece on and off for a couple months...with what little time I have on lunch breaks here and there. I'm finally at the point that I feel done with it. I'm sure there can be more done...but I am sick of looking at it, and I just want to have something FINISHED finally D: So here it is...

Anyways, I want to dedicate this one to an artist that I really admire. She goes by *euclase on dA and her work really astounds me.

I was inspired by her work…her paintings are gorgeous and I really wanted to try my hand at a realistic photo painting. Every piece she posts…I kept thinking ‘man, this can’t be THAT hard. I can do that. This will be a cake walk.’…and boy was I SO wrong D:

After I started working on this painting, which is from a little photo I saw of Rooney Mara (believe it was in Vogue), I realized that this is really….REALLY hard to do. My brain doesn't want to just paint what I see in a photo…I need to stylize it, I need to add more to it…and no matter how hard I tried to get out of that mindset…I couldn't do it. So instead of painting a realistic photo…I got this. Not to mention just getting the features to look photo-realistic was way more troublesome then I would have thought.

This whole process has made me really appreciate the work that *euclase does, and all the other artists out there that can look at a photo and just…recreate it with such skill. I hope to someday get as good, if not better at that skill…but it’s surely not easy and it’ll take a lot of time, practice, and patience.

A note on this painting - It’s not traced and it’s not a paint over *if anyone was wondering* I had the photo up while I worked, but I started from scratch…and it took me a few weeks to get it any where near resembling the original photo D:

-The End.

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Stats:
Inked and Colored: Photoshop CS 6
Based on original Photo of Rooney Mara, Photo used as reference.

Textures taken from cgtextures.com/