Permission Required

So. Sometimes I get these weird ideas to challenge myself. Sometimes it out of sheer boredom.. other times I feel stagnated in my creativity and forcing myself to be creative under pressure forces me to not censor myself as much. A sort of "Go with the flow" type of thinking I suppose.. or something, let's not get too deep and thinky. Usually the result is sub-par at best, in other words, not something I would post generally speaking. But. And it's a big butt.. I figured that maybe I should, with the whole not censoring myself in mind and all. And since I did get permission from the motif himself, I had even more reasons to post this.

So here goes. I challenged myself to dust of my Wacom Graphire 4XL and do a portrait of a friend with a size of 50x70cm @ 300 dpi. I only got to use two base colors (sort of). And after 45 minutes I had to stop, regardless of what it looked like. I do generally like to work quickly anyway, but 45 minutes for a portrait at a time when I haven't done anything like that in months, maybe even years, is quite a challenge. Not being able to correct any mistakes I might discover after the time has expired, was even more difficult.

Many thanks to beije, whom so graciously "volunteered" for this little experiment. Once I get the hang of this I promise I will do a better portrait, one that does you justice. Instead of one where you have creepy teeth. So, what I'm trying to say is "I'm sorry 'bout the creepy teeth, I'll do better next time".

Before.

After.