Learning to see better

That's what's happening now as a result of my decision to paint airbrush-smooth - I'm learning to see better. It's happening gradually, stage by stage - the painting is slowly moving toward looking much more human, and much more subtle and complex. It's because when you paint smooth, everything is tight and in crisp focus (except those areas you deliberately make soft-focus, or where you screwed up). It's like you can see much deeper into it now - like when a mud-veiled stream clears and you can see the bottom.

And it's only happening because I'm putting so much time into this - wait for the veils of mud to clear away, study the topography, and make the decision. Execute it - see how well it worked (compare back and forth a few times to the previous version - it's a lot like using a framegrabber program to do animation actually). Sometimes even after comparing back and forth for a while and deciding it looks good, some time later you might realize you overdid it or did it a little wrong, but now you begin to see what needs to be done.

As Dave Sim always said - first you get good, then you get fast, then you get good and fast. Working on the getting good part now.

Weird - I basically ended up re-creating the first image above, after deciding I didn't like the more lit-up, more colorful version as much. Unfortunately I failed to save a version at that stage (Waaat??!!) so I ended up grabbing the one posted here and inserting it back into photoshop (as a .png!) and reworking it slightly.

And now I see the windowshades of the soul need some tender loving care...