Basketball Girl Photoshop Speedpaint | Timelapse + Details

Below is a video of me speed painting this piece. Enjoy!

I'm happy I didn't give up on this, and love the final look of it all (minus the fingers---we'll work on cartoon hands in the next challenge).

A few days ago (four days or so) I drew a character while trying to strengthen one of my basic drawing weaknesses that I usually avoid...character posing.

I always draw my characters from the torso up or just facing forward, and not doing much with their hands or feet. They're just there, lifeless, and facing forward. Not moving, not holding anything, etc.

Just staring at you....

Which is pretty boring actually.

I did this challenge, because it was always easy for me to keep my characters simple, and like robots pretty much.

I played it safe, stayed in my comfort zone, and did this whenever I sketched from my imagination. Recently, I got tired of drawing the same thing or pose all the time so I took on the task of venturing out of my "comfort zone."

I didn't know what to draw so I looked outside, and saw my baby cousin playing basketball, and thought, "Why not draw a basketball girl? Yeah, a basketball girl...posing with a basketball?"

" Yeah, that's good, good."

I knew that there was no way I could come up with a pose from my head so I did the next best thing. I went on pinterest, and looked up some reference images that I could use as examples for this self initiated challenge.

Reference images are great to use when your’re stuck drawing something you aren't quite sure how to draw accurately from your imagination so I definitely recommend using them when you're in a bind.

At the end of the day this is what I came up with:

Not too fancy, but hey, it’s better than a torso—and yes, I draw, and sketch in ink only. I don’t like pencils. Shoot me.

Sketching wasn't enough. Since I'm learning how to paint in photoshop I figured I might as well take advantage of this, and practice there too.

Keep in mind that I am digitally illustrating/"painting" with my laptop mouse. And by “painting” I mean half painting, and half “painting effect” to give illusion of being digitally painted/blended since painting with a mouse takes waaaay too much time. Way more time than necessary.

Quick tip: if you’re attempting to paint with a mouse, and have absolutely no patience I don’t recommend doing it. Use a drawing tablet instead this will save your life.

My drawing tablet randomly stopped. It’s not responsive. It’s dead (it was probably cheap anyways). Don’t know what happened, but I won’t let that stop me while I'm waiting on a new one so....

At some point I asked myself "what are you doing"?

I wanted to stop since I was a little unsure,

but then I thought, oh well what’s the worst that could happen?

A crappy painting?

I didn't mind anymore since bad art is good art. The more trashy art you put out the better you get so it's all good...for practice of course.

Overall this digital painting/illustration took about 5 hours, and 43 minutes. It was horrifically therapeutic when I started cheating my way through this illustration to cut my hours in half of what it could have actually been. Okay, I won't like maybe like a third of time is me staring into space wondering what I'm doing with life, but still this took way longer than need which was what I expected anyways. Anyways, here is the final look:

Here’s a side by side comparison of the sketch and the digitally painted illustration of basketball girl.

The Hair turned out better than I thought it would. It was the most time consuming of everything I had to paint in this project.

The glow outlines were improvised while I was painting. I wanted the basketball girl to stand out a little more than she was since I wasn’t going to stick to a clear white background.

These lines were to clean cut at first so I used “Gaussian Blur” to get rid of the hard edges, and give the lines more of a soft look instead of chisel hard.