Red Tie Studios Portrait Blog » In Progress

Poe portrait painting

Red Tie Studios — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 17:02:21 +0000

Since this portrait wasn’t for a client other than ourselves, we took a long break in between starting and finishing the painting. We were also rethinking the composition midway.

Poe Portrait

Red Tie Studios — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:57:16 +0000

David and I (and our furry Maine Coon, Mojito) wanted a family portrait to hang in our living room, and decided that there was nothing better than having an illustrated family portrait. We wanted to add elements that spoke to our personality and interests, while being fun and happy overall.

Bella and Cookie Drawing

Red Tie Studios — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:57:50 +0000

Since we had great photos of Bella and Cookie, the drawing was easy as pie!

Portrait Bella and Cookie

Red Tie Studios — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:54:47 +0000

Cookie and Bella are the two lovable dogs of Tony and Andrea. Their portrait was commissioned to be ready for the holidays as a Christmas present, so we created a beautiful (and quick) portrait of Cookie and Bella, with love. Luckily, we were able to take our own photos and get high detail, great quality, shots of them while spending time with them in person. High quality photographs are essential to creating great portraits in short time frames!

Rosie Painting

Red Tie Studios — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:27:40 +0000

We came up with a few different color pallets and compositions until we decided on the right one. We started setting up the composition, color, and building out the painting digitally.

Portrait Rosie

Red Tie Studios — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:20:42 +0000

Portraits are always best when drawn from a live model, and we had the pleasure of drawing and photographing Rosie live while she was visiting Red Tie Studios this year. We were also able to talk in depth about what type of themes she wanted in her portrait.

Jason Drawings

Red Tie Studios — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 17:47:43 +0000

Jason’s portrait was created digitally, yet mimics traditional media and graphite. A special method was used for the drawing starting with a thicker and darker stroke, using a lot of movement, followed by erasing to accentuate the textures, then detailing with a smaller stroke weight.

Portrait Jason

Red Tie Studios — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:41:27 +0000

Goodbye parties are always better when you give a memorable gift that shows how much you appreciate the person who is leaving. Jason Ford’s portrait was started for this same reason, to say thank you, goodbye, and to share fond memories.

Michele Pagano update

Red Tie Studios — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:00:06 +0000

We made some changes to the details in the composition for the portrait of Michele Pagano. The first set in red, the second in green, and the final drawing in black. This is now ready to to be cleaned up and painted with comic book colors.

Brittany drawings

Red Tie Studios — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:30:41 +0000

We drew different versions of Brittany, hoping to capture her personality through reference photos taken by Eddie Vasquez. These finalized drawings are going to be compiled into the final artwork for the portrait.

Portrait Brittney

Red Tie Studios — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:42:16 +0000

This illustrated portrait was a going-away gift for a coworker that was leaving to pursue opportunities in California, where she is from. She has a very fun, high energy personality that we wanted to show.

The rough sketch was done knowing that we wanted the portrait to fit into a typical size poster frame of 18″x24″. Concept wise, we wanted to show the Frost Tower in downtown Austin (where the company is located) somewhere in the illustration but finally decided that it was unnecessary since the final illustration needed to have a simplistic background to accommodate signatures and goodbye notes of everyone from the company.

Reference photo by Eddie Vasquez.

Portrait Michele Pagano

Red Tie Studios — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:22:10 +0000

We were contacted recently by Ph.D. candidate David Frescas from New York, who wanted to give the gift of illustrated portraiture to Michele Pagano, award winning scientist, and his research instructor.

We love working with people who know what they want just as much as the ones who leave us completely in charge of their portraits, and David had very specific elements that he wanted included in the portrait. David let us know that Mr. Pagano loves the work of Jack Kirby, famed comic book artist, so we used that as our main pool of inspiration as we started planning the portrait.

Tanner and Cara line drawing

Red Tie Studios — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:52:14 +0000

For Tanner and Cara’s portrait, we started out formulating the theme through details in the costumes. Using their photo as reference, we changed elements of their original pose to create a more intimate embrace. We built the steampunk theme into the portrait knowing their interests in that subject. This will grow into their story as they create their own history together.

Maddison painting

Red Tie Studios — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:51:47 +0000

Maddison’s portrait is building some values and color. Her green eyes are so captivating and framed perfectly by the dark red hair.

Maddison line drawing

Red Tie Studios — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:51:17 +0000

We took that original rough sketch of Maddison’s portrait and created a clean line drawing to place all of the details of the painting and finalize the composition.

Maddison

Red Tie Studios — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:28:02 +0000

Maddison requested that her portrait be deep in color and mood to represent her introspective nature. We got to work right away sketching a scene that spoke of magic and mystery. A place to be perfectly alone and meditative.