Anyhoo, here’s a self portrait I did. MS Teams was being a butt during class and everything started an hour late, so I took another hour off of the planned itinerary and did this rage painting while narrating the process to students.

This really is my preferred “style” to work in. Some top level reasons:

• NO ERASE. NO UNDO. In digital painting workflows, this is anathema. An “undo” is usually 25 little teeny strokes and flourishes, and do you know how exhausting it is to go back through those? What a waste of your time it is?
• LAYERS are your erase/undo. Draw and paint what you’re gonna draw and paint. Does it suck? Cool! Set that layer (which stored 10 to 1000 little strokes and daubs) to 20%, create a new layer, and start doing it all over again.
• LINE ART HATER’S CLUB. Yeah I can do a line art if you want me to. But do I want to? No. I’m in a continuous quest for painterly flourishes when I paint this way. And the more I’ve digitally painted, the more comfortable I am with the idea that it’ll all get covered up by the end anyway, and until it hits that point, line art actually feels like a chore and a pair of shackles. If it’s in my sketchbook and ready to go, cool, but otherwise I’d rather not.
• ANGRY PROFESSOR RED PEN. If you just highlight everything that needs fixing directly with a “red pen,” you can often times….start blurring that out and it’s ready to go! Doing things like demarcating your construction lines and then having that notation turn into vibrant saturation hints later kinda works well.
• DIRECT PAINTERS ARE COOL. Dean Cornwell, Tom Lovell, John Singer Sargent, Joaquin Sorolla, and other painters in this modality always blow me away with how they’ll just dump the correct color mote in the exact right spot, and that’s the end of the argument. Heard a story once that John Singer Sargent would do the face all right then and there, and if it was wrong he’d scrape the whole deal off and start over.
• SPLASH OF COLOR DODGE. Getting that orange highlight at the end is an old favorite trick: just color dodge it a lil bit, either with a layer or a brush.
• I DISLIKE MICROSOFT TEAMS, 2FA, AND SO MANY DIGITAL BARRIERS. Nothing I’m doing really requires ANY fancy tool. Software was capable of painting like this 20 years ago. The greatest art in the history of humanity was people pushing dirt and mud around with sticks. Fanciness and pretentious tools are not needed. And, therefore, the barrriers to access that we still experience regularly are all the more awful.
• I KINDA KNOW MY FACE. I’ve done enough self portraits now that, IDK, I kinda remember the major features.