Painting is hard, painting from real life is also hard. Painting a likeness of a person is also, who would have guessed it, hard. Combine all of this, and you get a type of painting that is incredibly difficult to make look good. To top it all off, wedding paintings are supposed to look completed by the end of the night. That is the reality of wedding painting. It is a very high stress reality and leading up to that first wedding painting I was terrified.
I had been working on my speed for a while, trying to accurately lay out a scene in front of me and capture the energy that was apparent in the venue. On top of that, I was trying to use minimal brush strokes possible and still have a piece that resembled the couple. That was the hardest portion of the painting and in all honesty became a bit of my downfall for the night of progress. On the wedding night I had managed to crank out the sketch layer in less than a half hour. Yet by the night’s end I really only managed to place down the figures. The background was sacrificed for the greater good. Of course, later on I went back and finished the whole thing, revisions and finishing took 10- 15 hours total.
It is clear I have to work on speeding up to have a more “finished” painting in a span of a few hours.
If you would like to see the finished wedding painting check it out on my portfolio!