Digital portrait painting – Hoopoe Priestess for the greyscale series

So here is the 4th piece in my series of digital paintings trying to depict some sort of new race of people vastly more connected with and protective of the Nature.

In this one, I chose the hoopoe bird as the main feature. I remember seeing them in the yard as a kid, dipping their beaks into the ground, feeding on little insects. They always held some magic and mystery to my little mind then, and to this day, I still get a little excited when I see one. That is actually what inspired me to do this piece. I suddenly started noticing more visiting the garden of my current home, sun birds too. It is most likely just coincidence, but I like to think that it may have a little something to do with my gardening efforts. Yeah, I’m going to stick with that theory… it makes me want to get my hands in the soil a little more than I have been doing in recent weeks. It’s a good way to spend those little breaks away from the screen during the day.

Part of why I enjoy doing these sorts of pieces, is the research about the animals I include in them. I came across some interesting facts about the hoopoe bird HERE. Check that photo for #3.

Anyway… I wanted to capture a little bit of that sense of magic in this, with the slightly glowing leaves of the tree, the bird itself as a sort of living headdress on this priestess, with her face painted and adorned with lots of jewelry.

It’s a bit more detailed than the last illustration in the series of the Penguin Matriarch. I wanted to spend a little more time on this but also not over-render everything and draw attention away from where I wanted focus to be. So things like the strings of jewelry are more suggested than being these highly defined beads or similar.

The process…

Below is a look at the process, from the rough, broad strokes to put down some texture and get a sense of lighting, to changing decisions about some details toward the final piece. I didn’t have a clear sense of the finished product in my head when I started, so along the way I tend to put something down, erase, try again, don’t like it, erase, try this, erase, try that, “OK, maybe, but what if I do this…”

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Process for the Hoopoe Woman

If you like the piece, enough to want a print of it on your wall, I have archival quality prints available, along with the others in the series, on my INPRNT store HERE.

I painted this using Adobe Photoshop and an XP-Pen Deco Pro graphics tablet which you can find my detailed review of over on the Draw Your Weapon website.