Painting from a movie scene III
Published on HivePostify by @hiddenblade · Fri Mar 27 2026
For today, I want to focus on painting figures and contrast without needing to paint a lot of faces. Since [some] countries are making war trendy again, I picked a scene from a war movie.
Can you guess where this scene is from?
It's from a pretty popular movie but war movies almost look the same lol so I don't think this is an easy guess either.
I picked this scene from [Saving Private Ryan](https://film-grab.com/2018/01/08/saving-private-ryan/#) because it looks like a baroque painting. Absolute framing and the colors, which makes it a good one for practice.
I tend to be more confident sketching using paint than a pencil and I don't know why lol. I guess it's the act of erasures with pencil that I don't like and with paint I can just put another paint on top of it.
There is a dead body as a foreground (which is pretty symbolic, right?) and the main subject in the middle. There are more soldiers in the background but I only chose to paint the 4 of them.
For the foreground, I chose warm colors and cool for the rest to give it depth.
I focused on the contrast of the main subject against the background and I think it worked well. The main highlight of the image is their hands so I also want to do the same. I used orange and red for the colors of the focal point.
Here it is when done and I like that there are random dull colors in the background so it doesn't look mostly monochromatic.
I also did a quick painting of Tom Hanks just to fill the sketchbook haha. I didn't really make it look like him since it was quick anyway and I focused more on the placement of colors. :P
Tags: #painting#sketchbook#colorstudy#paintingstudy#savingprivateryan