How to Paint a Painting

Or, more specifically, how I painted THIS painting!  
I've always loved painting shows, and I've always loved painting, but my process does not readily lend itself to the public television format.  Where Bob Ross can crank out an eyepopping masterpiece with broad appeal in twenty-four minutes flat with the unblinking eye of the camera on him all the time, I tend to sit hunched on my living room sofa for hours on end.  Not very camera-friendly, plus my white-guy-fro is just nowhere near as cool as Bob's.
But, unusually for me, I actually took a fairly thorough series of photographs while I was working on this piece, so I've decided to make my own little Joy of Painting instructable about it.  Happy little instructable.  Living there in the forest.

Step 1 Decide What to Paint, and Draw it if you Want To

I do want to!  This is where Bob Ross and I really differ.  I've always been jealous of people who can just tackle that blank canvas with brushes and paint, allowing their image to evolve naturally as they go along.  But I'm not that guy.  I'm the guy who gets a very specific idea and wants to make sure it comes out just right, so I tend to do rather a lot of sketching on my canvases.
In this case, what I wanted to paint was a picture of Jim Henson's famous Muppet characters, but dressed up as the killer puppets from Charles Band's long-running series of low-budget horror films, Puppet Master.  I had wanted to do that for a while, but couldn't decide on which characters to use until I was re-watching The Muppet Movie, at which point I realized that Janis from Electric Mayhem looked eerily similar to Blade from Puppet Master, and this really got the ball rolling.  The shape of Beaker's head made him a natural fit for Tunneler.  And I chose Scooter for Pin Head mostly because I just really like Scooter.
So, once I had selected my Muppets and Puppets, I sketched a simple layout for the image.  This is an 8x10 canvas.  I sort of wanted to do it upright to better mimic the shape one of the movie posters, but I think the horizontal composition makes more sense for the image and ultimately, that won out.

Comments

[geraput]

http://;C828B>=.@D/

[MadMan.inc]

WOW you combined two of my favorite things puppet master movies and muppets?

[depotdevoid]

Nice one, thanks for sharing this! I've always been interested in the actual painting process.

[pokiespout]

Now copy it EXACTLY. I want it for Christmas. Or my birthday. Yeah, my birthday. In three weeks.

[anres321]

this is realy great !! :D 5*

[pokiespout]

Thanks my friend! I wasn't really sure if anybody would be interested in this one, but looks like I was wrong!