Below are a few recent studies I’ve done from black and white photos & film stills. These are great to practice your technique and workflow. I find it fun to experiment with colors and imagine how the scene appeared on set so many years ago. The top two pieces were painted in black and white and then solid color layers were placed on top and masked to particular areas. I also use hue/saturation and curves layers to fine tune things. This makes it so easy to find color combos that you like and you still have a (hopefully) solid black and white value structure underneath. It’s like infinite oil glazing.
The bottom drawing of Teddy Roosevelt is just an exercise in mark making, and is kind of typical of how I used to draw pre-computer with sharpie pens and sometimes scratchboard. I have one of my stylus buttons set as the eraser, so I can press it and immediately “carve into” each mark that I make. This constant addition and subtraction while drawing is incredibly powerful.
