: a rough, wrong-in-proportion-drawing trying to depict mr. Josh Homme (QTSA lead singer). what lead me to this portrait was this bold yellow light 'washing' his face. it really complemented the ginger feeling of his hair, kind of flame haired. as u see above, color are rough, volume is suggested, but
that´s nothing more than an exercise in color with pencils. what i'd like to show here is how one can go from sketch to a nice looking painting with some helping hand from photoshop.

this is the time to report i like a bit of impressionism twist in my digital painting, the maing goal here is not to render one of those too sophisticated digital portraits, i prefer a bit of 'dirt' to interfere with the too sharp digital look.. that´s a personal choice and a wip research in style as well.

ok, this was a bit of a quick jump, but not much was done here so far: only the strictly necessary to get things shaped up and going. we see a huge difference here in proportion issues that need to be fixed from my first eye-based-drawing. and i face that as an exercise to improve eye perfection. i don't really like distortions in portraits except for some cartoon aproach but nothing too funny. so i decided to take it to the closer i could of realistic proportions. all thanks to liquify tool. eye sizes and mouth need correction, the rest was pretty ok, if u go back to the drawing now u realize (as i did) eyes seemed lost inside this face along with the other features that didn't lack that much in proportion to the real face of the model.

i confess i like it here, with the rough pencil lines all around the almost sharp face, i would use it as it is, if some project allowed me some raw portraying aproach.

as it starts to look a bit more like a painting i feel i should detail here the brush tool used was mainly: round brush (size according too need) in 70% or around opacity, colors picked from tha base drawing and  so far no other tablet effect than just the pen pressure itself. trust me, if u stick to the refference, it gets the work done.

still not much difference from tools used so far, i`m sure i did come back to liquifying his face a couple times (his eyes are pretty strange shaped and i kept correcting it until i got tired of seeking god perfection), color in the eye was corrected, background was created to help me improving the volume notion in the whole painting and i messed with the hair since 2nd step to get rid of my sketch book limits that got on the way and to get rid of pencil look. so far no texture, dual brush or another set of different brush was used. trying to keep it plain, easy, and sharp in just one layer.

in this step, and after some more liquifiyng on step 4, i start getting just a little detail addict, i gave the beard some light texture (by setting brush to a minimum size and making crossed lines and later using a hair brush that consist in several dots that go together and make this furry look we can now se on his hair also). i hate the hard look of the hair when it look like that, its not natural we have no sense of each line in one's hair when seeing it live, so ill go back to a bit of a blurry look on the next step that feels more natural. so far i think i have a pretty good base for the sking and starting working with more hard looking edges (around 100% opacity) and get a more solid look from it perhaps texturin the lite in some points.

this is the final step so far: hair is beeing fixed. done with proportions, im blocking the masses and building shape with lite, texturing the lite with some dirty brush and sharpening the overall look.

this is what i got so far, still coming back here to detail the tools, give images some zoom details and finishing it, trying not go from over 2 or 3 more steps, don't want anyone getting bored here.

take care