Year ago I did portrait studies. Everything was off.
Now it's off, but slightly better.
I started by blocking out basic shapes like beard, eye sockets, beard, hair and beard.
Then on top of that I sketched indication of facial features, and then I looked into the mirror...
When you draw with pencil you don't have that luxury of moving and twisting, erasing and redrawing all these mistakes...
In digital drawing in the other hand it's not a problem, tho you may not have all the control over the line quality and precision that you have got with pencil.
Trade-offs...
Any way I figured out that I've fucked up the placement of facial features, so I just cut them of, moved where I needed them and then I started painting with colours.
The rest of the process is just softening edges that need to be soft, placing hard edges where you need them sharp, and continuous battle with dull, muddy colours.
During that process I was constantly checking my values in B&W mode. I know that at this point my values may be off but I don't want to push myself too hard.
Just hard enough to progress.
I don't want to put more effort into that than I've put a year ago either.
I'm just using that entire self-portrait thing to evaluate my current level of painting skill.
I'll try to make that an annual thing.
That's self-portrait potato from last year for a comparison
And here you can find entire process... If you want.
So long
