Making a Dreamy Fantasy Painting 💫🗡 my painting process

Hello everyone and I just wanted to show you some of the process of this latest painting I recently completed. If you see my last video I made this quite large painting inspired by my love of the blue graphite lights and legends and stories around limbs and nature and I was very very happy with how it turned out in the end and yeah it just felt like um taking a big step into the right direction for me concerning my art and what kind of stories I want to tell with my paintings. So after that painting I still felt very much inspired to continue with this idea and make a new piece. So like always I gathered some more inspiration and put together some images and paintings that really captured the atmosphere I wanted to emulate and while I was looking for inspiration I was super lucky to come across this gorgeous fantasy reference pack by Ximena Agra and I'm sure you you all know her she really does not need an introduction um she's just an amazing artist that inspires me so so much but I really want to work with one of these images since they fit my inspiration so well and just the blue gorgeous velvet dress also really reminded me of Arwen's dress in Return of the King um so everything about this was just chef's kiss. I started off with making just a super quick sketch not anything special but just for me to to get an idea of the composition and how I wanted to position her in the painting. So I got these two vintage frames a while ago and finally I want to use one of them so I thought I would go out and get a custom wood panel cut so it could fit in one of these frames. I think I want to use the the gold one but we'll see we'll see. In order to prep the wooden panel for oil paints I am first using this acrylic primer by Golden to seal all of the wood properly and I applied a few layers before going in with gesso on top of that. In the meantime I wanted to pack up this little painting to ship it to its new home. I am very very happy and so unbelievably grateful someone purchased this little study of some peonies I did a while ago and yeah I know I've said all this before but I really cannot believe the amount of support and I've been given with my art and here on YouTube as well especially on my last video so I just wanted to say again thank you all so so much for all the support and just watching and following along it really means everything to me and just thank you for making my dream come true. Now when I started this painting I really wanted to start with light transparent layers and kind of work my way up to using more and thicker paint strokes in the in the later stages. I've seen this technique used by a lot of artists I admire and I absolutely love how I can keep the shadows more translucent this way and I think it adds a lot of depth and light into the painting so I really hope to improve this more and more with future paintings as well. So first I made a quick little underpainting using some burnt umber and transparent oxide red to kind of map out the shadow parts of the face and this is what I mean about the translucent shadows because I will not add too much paint to these areas later on so these initial layers will peek through and give some interesting texture to those shadows I think. I really love this composition as well where her hair just slightly falls in front of her eyes so you can just barely see the pupil and I really struggled with keeping that subtlety but I really liked how it turned out in the end. Since her long beautiful dark hair really takes up a lot more space than the facial features I really tried to alternate my brushstrokes to keep the texture more interesting and just slowly building up these shadows and trying to keep it less flat compared to if I were to make super long similar strokes or just try to fill in the area immediately. The dress was also super tricky to paint but I really loved it just because of the lovely blue color and velvet texture which is quite new to me. I haven't yet used many blues in my paintings so far which kind of sounds silly but I cannot wait to incorporate more blues into other paintings as because I really really love experimenting with it on this dress. I really love working on the background just because she's standing in this beautiful garden surrounded by so much greenery and I just wanted to paint all of the leaves which I thought were super beautiful and also fit in quite nicely with the painting I made in my previous video. Now I did have some trouble with determining the level of detail I wanted the leaves to have and I think I could have worked on that a bit more but that is also the beauty of just creating and painting. It always teaches you something and leaves you with a lesson you can take with you to your next project and you will only keep improving. The important thing is that you just keep on trying again and again. In the end I'm very happy with how the painting turned out. I love seeing the initial texture of the shadows peek through in the final painting as well as the deep deep blue of the dress. And it was finally time to frame this. I'm always so excited whenever there's a frame I can use or whenever I find a frame that's just perfect for a painting and I thought this darker gold one suited this piece so well. And really with the frame I felt it completed the painting as if adding the final brush strokes. And whenever I look at it now it kind of feels like peeking into another world if that makes sense. I was also very excited to finally get to varnish my last painting just because I really really wanted to display this one on my wall but I wanted to varnish it first. I always love seeing all the colors come back to life and seeing how the painting is actually supposed to look. But I do really need to get a bigger varnishing brush. Thank you so so much for joining me once again. I hope you enjoyed seeing this painting come to life and I hope it inspired you somehow to create or keep creating in some way. Your support really means the world to me and I hope to see you all again soon.