Making of Birthby Vivien Hulbert, Canada



One of my first priorities when I begin to imagine a new painting is portraying beauty and balance. My palettes will often shift, sometimes quite dramatically, things will change about, but I will always strive to achieve harmony in the flow of form.

For “Birth”, I choose to depict the goddess of beauty, Venus. I wanted to paint a beautiful “real” woman -“real” meaning not too skinny, and not with gigantic silicone breasts – I have always admired and longed to have a really feminine, curvy body, but being pretty skinny myself, I just have to settle for painting them!:). So I hunted around for reference for quite sometime before finally deciding to use a shot by the talented photographer, Marcus J. Ranum. He does a lot of great stock and posts it on deviant art for all to use, completely free! His work is a great contribution to the art community and very inspiring. Please view his website here: www.ranum.com

In the first phase of the image, I loosely sketched the figure out to try to get basic proportions right away. I always use a flat color in the background, and usually change the color pretty often. I also roughly put in some blocks of color just to show where the light was hitting the body, and where other parts of the body were more shaded. I made a little starter palette and picked colors from there.


I was working at around 2800 x 5400 – not huge, but enough I think to get the detail I needed. I cropped and resized a few times so the size I gave is just an indication.

Once the torso seemed acceptable, I went on to shading, just to test the waters a bit.


Once I got a bit of the face done, I then started playing with the idea of having a very natural kind of background, with light colors, like on a beach at sunrise. I also started thinking about how her hair might look (even though in the image here it still looks like nothing more than a scribble).