Commission #5
This commission I am currently working on is by far probably one of the most daunting ones. Since I do my commissions by auction via a Discord server for artists, the final price is ultimately not decided by me.
So far, I think that I've not discussed price on my blog for these commissions or any past work because I thought it was generally unneeded and impolite. But, this one has seriously changed my view of my work and the career path I potentially want to take. And this is still a result of my Masters - this self reflection and learning - because I am doing these commissions purely out of the ideal of wanting to challenge myself to translate various styles of references and characters/character art given to me by clients INTO my own style. I started working on this particular piece on 19/05/2024.
The final price of this auction was 550 USD. Which is 431.99 GBP.
So - yes: my point with this is that I am very much trying to make this art piece the best I possibly can as to justify the price. I felt like this was an important emphasis to make because it has genuinely resulted in me considering the validity of doing these kinds of commissions for a source of income. I don't want to stop being a 3D artist at all though. So, right now, I am considering after my Masters that I'd like to try going freelance for a while; doing a mix of these portrait commissions, and selling my 3D models online on a marketplace like Sketchfab or Unreal for passive income.
I know I am not done with my Masters yet as I write this, but, I feel really quite grateful and inspired by all the research I have undertaken during my Masters that led me to this current project about translating stylisation to my own 2D artwork, and now, the current career choices I get to deliberate.
This commission is for someone by the username of Kenobi. He is commissioning it for himself but also on behalf of his friend. They both play mother and daughter on a different fantasy roleplay server/game and so these characters they want me to paint are their own ones they play. They wanted a portrait in my usual style but with two people.
It was Kenobi's friend that provided me with a Google Doc full of references, which you can see below in my two collages, although you may have to click the image and zoom in to read the text:
These references are really good and are clear for me to understand which is really appreciated. This ends up taking a lot of time out of my process of hunting down references of my own across Google and Pinterest, allowing me to focus mostly on painting.
I ended up coming to the conclusion that it was really important for me to make sure that the mother and daughter actually look related, but also while keeping their respective ages in mind. I didn't want the child who is meant to be 8 years old as written in this doc to look super gorgeous with sleek cat-like eyes, makeup, a long slender face... etc.
As you can tell in the second collage though, the main references for the child's face is quite unfitting for her age in my opinion. So, I tried to use this as a main reference for her features like lips and nose and general demeanour instead.
My process:
Firstly I drew up quickly this little diagram to confirm whether or not I understood what my client and his friend intended for the mother's hairstyle, since I was worried I misunderstood it from the reference Google doc. They both indeed confirmed this was correct and so I continued on sketching the real thing!
I found that doing diagrams like this with colour codes really helps me convey what I mean to both myself and my client. A lot of the time, I think that I am not so good at explaining myself in text, or that it is easier to visually understand my intentions like this.
This is the first real sketch I sent to Kenobi, asking for his approval to continue on. I made sure to ask if they both agreed that I got the hair right too, which they said I did and that they were really happy with it so far already.
You can see that I wrote a note saying "I will add the crown later" too. Because of my last commission, in my last blog post, I found that adding in the crown later down the rendering pipeline was effective for me last time, so I will do it again here. I want to do it this way so that it allows me to really paint and render the hairstyle that seems to be really important to my client too, so that's why I am doing it this way.
Also, I end up elongating the woman's arm on our left because it was way too short and I didn't realise it upon sending this sketch. It wasn't brought up by my commissioner, but it was something I noticed myself.
These are the next two images I sent to my commissioner as to ask for their approval and thoughts to continue on. I try to always ask for their input at every significant stage like this early on, making sure that everything is aligned with their vision before I properly go in to start rendering. Because, mostly, if you get the sketch right to their liking, I've found (ideally) a lot of what you paint and render doesn't really change much from the sketch.
This is why I purposefully try to keep my sketchy lines clean. Or at least clean enough so that my client can understand my intentions. And, for what isn't included in my sketch, I make sure to mention it in text and explain. I found that during these commissions this became a really important thing to do because generally most of these clients are not artists themselves, so they may struggle to understand where and how the art will develop from really simple sketches like this.
I got approval to move on and their general love of the progress so far, with the only request being that to make the child's hair slightly longer.
In this moment though, I felt like it was the mother that looked generally a lot better. 'Better' in the sense of perhaps objectively her face and such is more anatomically correct maybe. I don't think it is about subjective beauty.
I start to move onto rendering the mother's face now anyway. You'll be able to see later on how I tackled the aforementioned problems as well as my whole struggle with it.
This is the next stage in my process where I updated my client and asked for his opinion. In my message to him, I ask if that both him and his friend think the features I've painted are still good in their eyes. I asked because as I continued on painting, I ended up fixing (at least, in my opinion) some blatant anatomy errors. I also slightly moved some features around too, like some areas of her nose and eyes.
Because I had this concern, I wanted to make it easier for my client to potentially even see what issues I was trying to point out in the first place. So, I sent these side-by-side-by-side comparisons above. This way, I wanted to be able to offer the option of my client being able to say, for example:
"I like the nose shape in the middle image, and prefer the eyes of the third image. Can you combine this?"
Again, as a visual learner myself, I try to put myself in the shoes of my commissioner and think what would make it easier for ME to understand my options, etc.
Though, even with all that, both my client and his friend said that the features are still good and that it 'gives the vibe' they wanted!
The next 'stages' is where the struggle begins... Or at least my first struggle, if there is more to come...
I kept painting the child's face and I got to a point where I realised it looked really unlike the sketch and that I thought she just looked really wrong and a bit ugly.
There was one day after I spent a good few hours painting the girl's face and it ended up looking like it does on the right. I ended up flicking back and forth between the sketch on the left and my version on the right and realised that I messed SOMETHING up. I didn't know how I got to this stage really.
I know that as I painted I tried to fix a few anatomy errors. Or what I thought to be anatomy errors.
For example, the nose shape and general eye area changed a lot above. The eyes became generally quite slanted downwards compared to the sketch. Though, I do think that the general positioning and angle of features became objectively better? The face doesn't look like it is on a wrong angle compared to where the features point at the camera.
These are some of the stages I went through of trying to figure out this girl's face... You can see I even started to question the mother's face too.
I was sending all these stages out to the commissioner too but also to my other artist friends to ask for feedback on what to edit or try.
I think that this became a case of where I needed to simply put away my drawing and come back to it with fresh eyes the next day. It got to a point where no matter what I did I couldn't seem to make it work or look nice, and it became really quite frustrating.
You can see, particularly more to the top side of the collage, that I was messing around with her general face shape and jaw a lot. I tried to add more skin to the edges of her face to make her face fuller in areas. I tried to take away fat from her face to make it slimmer too. I tried messing around with how her cheeks and chin connect and what sort of line that forms.
As well, it wasn't just the outline of this face that bothered me, but things like the nose length and eyes - I couldn't seem to get to a spot I liked too. Everything seemed to look like a caricature to me; her face became so exaggeratedly diamond-shaped or round, or with a really pointy chin which nothing suited her.
I tried editing the depth of the girl's eye sockets too. I also tried seeing the differences between a really rounded brow shape compared to straighter, narrower ones more like her mother's.
I even screen-recorded videos to send so that it was easier to see what I was comparing and the differences between all the stages I was going through.
Though, after this, I really decided I needed to just move on.
Another day, I tried to fix the face in some different ways. Still consulting with other people for feedback, it was suggested I try making the length of the nose smaller, giving more space between the top lip and the bottom of her nose. I also changed the size of her eyes.
I still continued making changes to her face as a whole here, but, I think that this one made a bigger positive difference than anything else.
With the final (bottom right) image in the above collage, I decided to leave it at this for now and move onto a separate part of the image. I'm still not completely satisfied with her face, but, I have faith that it will all tie together in the end.
What I learned:
When I reflect on this whole struggle with this girl's face though, I feel as though I am led to the conclusion that sometimes, to make something look good and appear as though it actually is anatomically correct, you actually have to stylise it more.
But this sounds really weird, doesn't it? To make a face in my case look realistic and valid to the human eye, I needed to really play around with the proportions and in some cases make things, what I thought, be objectively drawn wrong.
The sketch of the girl originally had a lot more feeling to it. It communicated more to the viewer, I think. It looked a lot more livelier.
Though, looking back at the sketch now too, there are also a lot of blatant errors where things are just slightly wrong:
- Eyes seemed as though they were bulging out
- Eyes are too 'pointed' and cat-like where they needed to be rounded
- The nose angle doesn't match the rest of the face
- Eyesockets too deep
- Eyebrows framed wrongly because of deep eye sockets
- General weirdness around the whole of the jawline/chin/outline of face.
And yet, even with all these errors in the sketch, this sketch always looked preferable compared to my painting.
My painting of the girl, I think, is generally OK. Like, the placement of colours and such makes sense (I hope). But, in my objective of trying to paint as realistically and render as much as I could, I felt like I lost a lot of charm and good looks that my stylised sketch had that was exchanged for 'anatomical accuracy' and my attempt at realism. I had to go back and purposefully un-detail parts of my painting process in order to make it look better.
This is where I learned that, truly, tunnel-visioning into realism and (even accidentally) forsaking any sense of stylisation in art really backfired.
It meant that I wasn't able to visually communicate effectively to my viewer, and of course, my client.
Which I think was a really important lesson to actually experience myself in my Masters obviously focusing on art styles in art. This general advice had been spoken about time and time again in various lectures and by industry practitioners before of course, but it really is different to come to the conclusion myself after experiencing it. At least now, I have the words to hopefully explain what happened to my process AFTER I have the knowledge from aforementioned industry practitioners.
This really makes me recall my interview with Kevin Manning, which I discussed in a
previous blog post.
Moving on...
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