The Origin of O'ren Ishii

For painting we started oil last week. First thing we did was still lives, mine turned out pretty well but that's at school at the moment. For homework we had to take any scene from a movie and paint it. I asked if we could do videogames and my teacher said it was fine as long as it wasn't cartoony or anything with a unique visual style (I'm assuming this applied to movies as well).

At first I was going to do Half-Life 2's plaza during the intro, then I just scrapped the whole idea. I decided to think of a film that I absolutely adore that also had great composition and was visually appealing. I thought of any Wes Anderson film due to his prominent use of primary colours and 1 point perspective/symmetrical shots, more precisely The Royal Tenenbaums. 


Then I thought of the director I absolutely adore: Quentin Tarantino. I first thought of doing something from Inglourious Basterds, but there's that whole Nazi motif that I knew some would get offended. Then there was that dancing scene from Pulp Fiction. But I settled for my most favourite film by QT, Kill Bill. I went with the fight scene with O'ren Ishii in Kill Bill vol. 1, Chapter 5: Showdown at House of Blue Leaves; that scene had tons of beautiful shots it was difficult to choose. Anyway, here are the WIP pics and final:

The final.

Close-up of O'ren.

I'm very proud of it. Sure I can see the many faults in the painting, but I achieved so much of what I wanted I'm proud. I'm proud of the face, except her right eye. And I absolutely love how her left hand turned out it's perfect. I had Leyendecker paintings at the side to reference and it really helped a lot while doing this painting especially the hand. I didn't want to paint it exactly like it is in the film, because then I would have been scrutinizing over it all day. So I looked at the original and just referenced it, but drew it on my own and with a little bit of Leyendecker style. 

Let's just say, where have you been all my life oil paints?