ARTIST:
Shadowmyst Art, Sharon O’Shea Wood
MEDIUM: Digital Painting
TOOLS: Procreate, iPad Pro, Apple Pencil Pro
STYLE: Painterly Realism
ORIENTATION: Landscape
CREATED: 2026
STATUS: Prints available
DIMENSIONS: 11 x 14 in
Printed on Giclee Archival Fine Art Paper in your chosen size and mailed directly to you. Price varies by size.
Waiting captures a young woman suspended in private thought — chin resting in her hand, a blue ceramic mug held loosely at the table’s edge, her gaze moving somewhere beyond the frame. She is present in body; elsewhere in mind.
Painted in a painterly realism style using Procreate on a 13″ iPad Pro M5 with Apple Pencil Pro, the figure is rendered with warm, luminous skin tones set against a softly impressionistic background of blurred color — suggesting a café, a gathering, a public moment turned quietly inward.
Waiting is available as a fine art Giclée print. Custom figurative portraits — capturing the unguarded moments that matter — are available on commission.
Artist’s Process:
Waiting was painted entirely in Procreate on a 13″ iPad Pro M5 with an Apple Pencil Pro, building depth through layered digital brushwork in a painterly realism approach.
The portrait began with a structural drawing establishing the pose and proportions — particularly the foreshortened forearm and the weight of the figure leaning into her hand. Color blocking followed, laying in the warm mid-tones of the face and the cooler values of the cream sweater. Skin tones were developed through multiple transparent layers, building luminosity in the highlights and warmth in the shadows.
The auburn hair required careful attention — individual strands were suggested through directional brushwork across multiple layers to convey the natural curl and upswept volume without losing softness. The ribbed sweater texture was achieved through controlled parallel brushwork that reads as fabric under the light.
The background was painted as a loose impressionistic field of color — warm and cool tones blurring into one another to evoke a busy environment receding behind the stillness of the subject. A canvas texture was applied to the final piece to give the digital painting physical presence.
Challenge:
The foreshortened forearm and hand.
The figure’s left arm extends forward toward the viewer, with the hand curling around a mug at the lower frame — a pose that required careful foreshortening to read naturally without distorting the proportions. Compressing a three-dimensional limb convincingly in a two-dimensional painted surface, while preserving the relaxed quality of the gesture, demanded repeated refinement of the arm’s angle, the hand’s scale relative to the face, and the mug’s placement. Getting this right was essential: an awkward arm would have broken the entire sense of ease and interiority the portrait depends on.