I think it’s time to stop messin’ around with this painting or I will end up ruin it completely. Done my very best to ruin Will Smith already, so that will have to be enough :p

I’ve given him a bit smoother skin, a more detailed goatee, some sideburns, more highlights and some details in one of the eyes that wasn’t there before. And in the opposite to what I planned to do I painted the background in the same layer as the rest, which is usually more difficult than to do it on a separate layer. But this is a big painting so the more I can do in one layer, the happier is my computer :p The only thing that is in a separate layer is my signature.

I will add this to the prints that you can win in a bit. Should make a fairly good size print if anyone would want this :)
But Photoshop is closed for today and it’s already 7.30 PM here. This took most part of my day today, so I guess it’s time to come back to reality again :p Tomorrow it’s a regular work day again.

Hope your Sunday is/was a good one :D

As some of you know I mixed a green drink on an every day basis for quite some time a while back. Cucumber, celery, fresh spinach and apples filled the fridge here and both the blender and the juicer never had a chance to get dusty.
Then one day my digestive system put an end to it. In a way. I had signs that I got way too much fiber and in the beginning I stopped making that green juice all together, deciding that I should start again when the symptoms vanished and mix that drink once every second day instead. I also switched the fresh spinach for some lettuce and used only half the amount of celery.

When you start a detox it takes a while before you notice any changes and can point them out, but when you stop a detox or change the pattern of it you notice pretty much straight away when your body is storing all that poisons stuff again. And it happens pretty quickly. At least it did for me.
What vanished with that green juice was a lot: my skin changed, especially in the face, and deep wrinkles became much more shallow; no dizziness and no headaches like before; easier to focus and less lethargic; more energy overall; my body temperature stopped going up and down like a yo-yo and my mood became a lot more even. No big ups and downs at all. I also lost weight that I honestly have no clue where it came from to begin with, and I lost it in spite of eating in the same way and move just as much (or little) as before.

Now it’s been a few weeks ago since I had to fall back and make this drink once every second or third day and the different is huge. I’m always tired, my body temp flips from normal to high within seconds (and no, it’s not menopause…not yet), the hair’s gone dry and brittle and the dizziness is back again.
When it comes to the weight it’s difficult to say, but I’m not losing anything, that’s for sure. Except from clothes that fits me :p

In the past I never believed in detox, I always put it in the same box as witchcraft and ghosts :p Neatly tucked away and labeled :p
But these past few months changed my mind about that bit and now I’m almost ready to believe in ghosts and witchcraft too. Almost :pp Seriously, it has an amazing effect on the system and it made me realize how food can make a difference.
I mean, I’ve read about how fast food affects children and teenagers, and that it will make them both moody and difficult to deal with. And most food these days, not just fast food, is full of additives of all kinds and it affects grownups as well, no question about that.

So now I need to get my hands on a nutritionist or similar. The nurse I talked to at the docs office a few weeks back knew less about this than I did, so she wasn’t especially helpful. She handed over brochures and that was pretty much it. I could have picked those up in the waiting room :p
That NHS here won’t provide any preventive health care I already know…but they should since they are the ones who slap people around for being obese and sick. How can anyone stay healthy if they won’t teach people how to eat?? It’s just stupid.

I might just continue with this drink and slowly upper the amount I’m drinking in a week to see if my body will adjust better that way. It might have gone in to a shock or something since I literally poured it full off all that good stuff on an every day basis from day 1 :p
In any case, I might have to find a better substitute for that fresh spinach than lettuce. The green veggies is what makes a difference. Well, the outer layer on the cucumber is actually great for detoxing as well, just as the celery and the apple…but I might have to add something else that is all green to kick my system in the right direction again as it seems.

But it really makes a huge difference to drink that juice on a daily basis…that I can assure you.

All the paint is there and now it’s time for the details. I will leave the brush strokes visible in this painting, so what I need to do next is to adjust shadows and highlights a bit more since I don’t want the brush strokes to be too big. And I haven’t even started the background yet, so that needs to be done too.

I might also add some more highlights on the tip of his nose, just below his eyebrows and I need to do some more work on his eyes. The details on his ear will also be less visible when I’m done with this.
But this is what it looks like right now.

I’m about halfway with this painting now and I know it looks a bit weird :p Like he popped his head inside a bit of carton or something…hehe The reason is that I’m painting all of this in one layer…well, not the background…but everything else.
The sketch is still there…at least where I haven’t covered it with the main paint layer. There’s 6 different shades of brown, yellow and red in this…and a few varieties of green as well. I’m still in that colorful, twisted mood, so I’m using color as if I was 5 years old :pp

With that in mind I’ve got commissions for Christmas gifts coming in, which means that I need to get myself to see faces and people the way they are again :p At least for the time being. And I might add that it’s easier to go from painting portraits that looks real to this twisted mood than it is to go back again, so that will be interesting. Those paintings will be updated and posted at Paperbag Designs blog though. There’s already a sketch in there if you haven’t already seen it.

But, the plan is to finish this today since I’m free to paint the sky yellow on a Sunday if I would want to :p More on the painting above later :)

Well, I’m alone and unsupervised since it’s Sunday and I thought I’d take the opportunity to paint for a while. Especially since it’s Monday and work tomorrow again.
This sketch might not give away a whole lot, but when it’s done it’ll be Will Smith…a very twisted version of him :p I like Will Smith. It’s a shame he’s not done any movies lately…been very quite for some time now.

Most caricatures of Will focus on his ears, so I wanted to make this a bit different and focus on everything but the ears :p And of course if possible still make it possible to recognize him.
I’ve already started to paint this and this sketch might look a bit weird, but when I paint like this I try to do as much of the painting as possible at the painting stage instead of the sketch. The sketch becomes a way of setting the boundaries more than anything.
So hopefully it’ll look better when I’m done with this than what it does in this sketch :p

We had a very rainy and cold morning today, but it turned out sunny about an hour ago. And very windy. Guess it can still change during the afternoon, but right now it’s nice :)

Hope your weekend is a good one and I will be back a bit later :D