Speed Painting in Photoshop CS3

Not to be confused with the time lapse paintings available on YouTube often labeled as speed painting, real speed painting is a practice by which an artist gives him/herself a, usually short, time limit to lay out a painting or composition.

Speed paintings generally do not involve a beginning sketch. Instead the artist lays out block and shapes of color to begin to establish the basic composition, values and volume.

Playing with the concept, I created this painting in Photoshop CS3 [though the speed part isn’t quite there – it took around 3 hours to get to this point]. I plan to keep working with the process in hopes that it will help speed up my normal painting process as well [not to mention that these are just fun to do]. Some of the steps and a mini-tutorial for this painting are after the jump.