20s Femboy breakdown + brushes.

Hey there friend!

from now on I will try to make a post like this for each new picture or series I make, the idea is to give you a deeper look on my creative process and the inspirations for my my paintings, hope you will find it interesting! with that said, let's start.

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My main inspiration for this picture was the actress Louise Brooks:

 in particular, her role and aestetics on the movie Pandora's Box (1929) 

As you can see by her hair style and clothes, the inspiration here was very close😅 you can also see by these screenshots that many of panels on my series were direct inspired by shots from the movies:

 Unfortunately, due to time constrains, I couldn't make all the ideas I got from the movie, these two shots in particular I feel like they would have made for awesome paintings:

I just love her expression on the left image, that little smirk plus the messy hair would have made for a fun bit of character development. the pic on the right is great for obvious reasons, it it could have made for a nice scene where the  femboy (I really need to give him a name 😅) and his partner would switch positions for a bit,  it's too bad it wasn't possible, but maybe in a future part two ^^

 Another big inspiration was the "roaring 20s" as a whole obviously, the aesthetics of the era are just great! it has a very interesting mix of glamour and decadence that do for some great vibes, here's some photos from the era (or movies made around that time) that inspired me greatly:

 One aspect I knew I had to try and capture was the parting and dancing, this is a very iconic aspect of the time, with some women of the era receiving the label of "flappers", a slang for young and brazen women who dance, drink, party and flaunted their disdain for what was considered "acceptable behavior" at the time, initially I had plan on naming the series "Flapper Femboy", but I don't think the term is popular enough for the serie's idea to be properly expressed.

 On the artistic side, I end up on the final style for the series sort of by accident , initially the painting style was suppose to be similar to that of my other series:

I've used my regular round painting brush, with angular shapes, and a mix of hard and firm edges, this is a style that I like a lot, it usually make the forms "pop" more, and it also makes the shapes look more "graphical" and stylized.

However, at some point I felt like this style wasn't capturing the smoothness of the skin that was the initial catalyst for this whole series, this was the image that start it all:

 Despite being Black and White, you can just "feel" the smoothness and paleness of her skin in this photo, that paired with her loose clothes create an sensation that I really wanted the capture.

 To achieve this effect I decided to go back to a style I've had use many years ago on some other pictures:

 In the end, it worked pretty well! this technique is very simple to be honest, what you do is to basically just paint all the shading using a very soft airbrush:

 As you can see here, by using a very soft brush you are able to depict even the most subtle of the anatomy while still maintaining the appearance of a smooth skin:

 Another aspect you can do with such brush is to show skin texture properly, things like veins, moles, freckles and skin pores  are pretty easy to do when work with an air brush:

Here's a small gif with the shading process:

and finally, I've attached to the post all the brushes I've used in this painting ^^

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And that's it friends! hope you find this post interesting and got some useful information out of it ^^

Thanks a lot for your support friends!

Cheers!