I received some very positive comments on my Mountain Angel piece and some people asked me how I did it, how I approached the complexity of the piece. It is indeed my most complex piece to date – I considered everything very carefully, asked a lot of professional artists for advice and opinion, really did my best. And it was my first piece to do “the right way” – with initial value, composition and color studies and all that.

Ideation and reference photographs

A lot of my ideas hit me when I least expect them – in the shower, when I go for a walk or when I’m just daydreaming in a coffee shop. This one was no different. It was maybe a week or two since I got the news of my friend’s death and I remember I was still working on my portrait of her. I was browsing through the photographs of her I have on my computer and when I saw these two, the idea just got in my mind.

The photographs were not taken by me, but by another friend of her’s named Sasho. I don’t know the guy personally, but the credit here goes to him.

At first my idea was a bit different – I was thinking about classical angel wings (with white feathers), I didn’t consider to paint a bird (or anything else but her and an environment) and wasn’t sure about the background – if it’s going to be night or day, or sunset. I even thought about a more sci-fi/fantasy environment with two moons and a purple sky with bright stars.

Defining the idea

Having a rough vision/idea of what I want is what is most important, I think. As long as I got that, I’m fine, I can just sit down and define it in my sketchbook. So how and why did I come up with the idea of the wings? Well, my main inspiration was actually a character from the Diablo video game, an angel called Tyrael:

One reason to go with this wings is… well, they are cool and different. I like different (sometimes). The other reason is much more pragmatic: lighting.

I had to go with the lighting on this picture – first, because I liked it – it defined the facial features of the model quite well (in contrast with the second photo, where flash was used, flash always makes photos look flat). Second… well, I’m not good enough to change the lighting on a photo and keep a good likeness with the model. I think very few people can actually do this well. So I needed a way to explain this particular lighting in the piece. If I went with the classic bird wings idea, they would put shadow all over her face. While with this fancy and glowing wings I can: 1) explain the light source on the left part of her head; 2) paint waving hair on her right – that would explain both the shadow on her face and the rim/bouncing light on her features and the edge of the face – hair is transparent and soft, so light would come through it.

So all of a sudden the thing started “working” and I got encouraged to continue.

Value and color studies

I think this is the first time I actually did real value and color studies for a piece – I wanted to clear the idea as perfectly as possible. I knew things will change eventually, but I didn’t want to just paint stuff randomly, then erase what wasn’t working, then repaint. I really wanted this piece to be perfect. Eventually, I did maybe about twenty value studies and about twenty in color.

With value studies I tried to see how I’m going to make the viewer first see the girl, tried to see whether the wings are too overpowering, to see how I’m going to “guide” the eye of the observer through the painting.

As you can see, this studies are very rough – all I need at this point is to know where to place what, the pose of the model and most important of all – the values in the picture. What value should be the dress, and if it is say, the lightes value (a white dress), would it fit with the skin (which is also a light value) and the rest of the environment? What’s the value of the foreground hilltop she’s sitting on compared to the hilltops on the background? I didn’t need any details in here – that’s just pure design. It also helped me to define my idea even further – I had this crazy vision of the eagle to be all made of light/magic and to emerge from her wings. And the reason why I chose this horizontal format is because i wanted to give the painting a more cinematic, epic feeling.

Eventually I went with a more down to Earth picture with a real eagle. The red color is usually a middle value and fitted nicely with the rest of the image (against the very bright value of the wings and the dark of the rocks the angel is sitting on). It’s also the color of passion and always manages to attract attention – just like what my friend was. A truly passionate person.

The painting process

So after I’ve done all this preparations and design decisions, I started painting. The biggest problem I faced was the anatomy of the model, since I had to do the stretched arm and her leg/foot from imagination. I took photos of myself and asked friends to take pictures of themselves posing in similar poses.

Here’s my ex girlfriend posing for me on her webcam while I’m doing quick sketches.

Eventually I ended up with arm from my ex girlfriend, hand from another good friend and a foot from on of my flatmates. I had to adjust them to fit the angel and make them her’s. A hard task for my skill level, indeed… so I made some horrible mistakes, like a way too long arm, huge foot, etc. When you look at a painting for a very long time you just don’t see the mistakes… Now I just laugh at myself for not seeing them, they’re so obvious. See for yourself:

At some point I also made another crucial mistake: I stopped looking at the reference images… Somehow. I just got so much into it. So i lost the likeness a little bit.

The shape of the hair against the shape of her face is quite wrong. Also her cheeks are way too big.

Another funny thing is the arm – a lot of people, including some pro artists somehow didn’t notice it was too long… I don’t know how that happened. So I had to change this when the piece was near complete.

Finally, I had to also change the position of the eagle – it’s initial pose suggested it would land on her arm… Which considering the size of the bird doesn’t make much sense (it would literary crash her arm). So the eagle was repainted from scratch.

Finishing touches

After I made those critical changes, all I needed to work on was the wings, add more detail, work a more on color mixing around the image and make everything fit. Here’s the almost-final image without the finishing touches:

And again, the final picture:

Final Thoughts:

I really did my best with this piece. I wanted it to have a little bit of drama, I wanted it to have a certain feeling to it, and I’m glad that in the comments I got people have notice just this – the emotion.

As far as symbolism goes – the golden Ankh on her neck- an ancient symbol of eternal life, for I will do my best in the future to make her immortal through my work, with all the abilities I posses. Again, the striking red dress symbolizes her passion, the flame in her eyes. The eagle symbolizes freedom, while pose of her hand and fingers are very much inspired by The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo – just a suggestion for her divinity. The mountain environment is because the Mountain was where she felt alive the most and where she died (in an accident while climbing).

I hope you enjoyed the piece and reading about it’s creation process.