Shawn Mooney inspired painting

As I had no set story project to work in this semester it's given me more chances to branch out and test different styles. One of the styles I was looking forward to trying was Shawn Mooney's method of paint over characters. During third year Shawn visit for a live demo class where he showed us his process of painting over and transforming an image if there Russian soldiers into a sci-fi inspired piece. He talked about using the existing light and colours in the basement image to help blend the painting into the photo so that it didn't look obviously painted on and kept some photo realism.  Because of this I found that when painting my inspired piece it took a lot longer to paint than expected as I felt I had to try make it more photorealistic and put effort into blending painting and instead together. As a result I feel like the overall design could have been better. It was a new technique is never tried before so I wasn't expecting a masterpiece. I can see how this technique could be very powerful and useful to use as it worked in areas of the painting and I've seen it used well by Shawn Mooney.

To improve and speed up this technique I should try mimic how a camera would work for taking a portrait image like this. This would be some areas such as the background and anything below to torso could start to loose camera focus. Helping the viewer look where I'm wanting them to and to cut down on the amount of details I'd need to spend painting.