Digital Portraits

As promised, here are some portraits I've painted in Photoshop over the last couple of months.

This first one is from a photo reference. Unfortunately the reference didn't have very strong lighting, so it was hard to pick out the shadows and render the form.

As you can see, I kept the sketch in, because the image looked really flat without it. Also, you'll notice I didn't finish rendering the hair or shoulders. I was pretty fed up with the image by this stage and abandoned it, although now that I look at it again, it's not too bad and I might go back to it.

The second image is another abandoned attempt. I painted this one from imagination, sketching out the face first before painting it. Although I like how some of the features are rendered (the eyes, for instance) there are some pretty major structural problems that I didn't really notice until I started painting it.

I followed a great tutorial on Youtube whilst painting this image (don't judge the tutorial on this result!). I particularly liked the part about mixing colours towards the start of the video. I found it much easier
to choose colours using this technique than just trying to pick them directly from Photoshop's colour picker.

You might recognise the model in the third painting from my last post. With two poor paintings
behind me, I decided to remove one of the variables and paint in greyscale. Also, I've read about a technique in which you paint in greyscale first, then in paint over the top in a flat colour on a multiple layer, which I might try a little later.

I took the opportunity to try and correct the likeness of the image a little by making the nose bigger, the eyes a little smaller and changing the angle of the left cheek. It's still not perfect, but I'm very happy with the result.