DIGITAL PAINTING PRACTICE- PORTRAIT

I wanted to make something that was in my comfort zone to get back into the zone of creating things and getting use to the digital drawing tablet so I decided to draw a female portrait as this is something I am comfortable with. I know that it is good to go outside of the comfort zone but when starting off something new I think it's good to stick to what you know and then experiment more further down the line.

I started with laying down the base colours of the skin and the hair.

I then added an undertone of purple and red to give a bit of depth to the painting, I also used a darker red for the shadows rather than just black as using black can sometimes overpower an image. I then used a pale blue colour for the highlights to contrast with the warm tones of the skin and shadows.

I started to paint the eyes, nose, lips, ears and fine details of the face to start bringing the image together.

I then looked at the image and realised one of her eyes was not aligned properly and her face was a bit off so I painted over it to correct those mistakes.

I added more highlights and shadows on the face. I also rendered the hair a bit more and added more strands to give it a more natural hair look.

I'm happy with how the drawing turned out especially since it was drawn in one day. I would like to do more tutorials about the face structure and how render it better so that it can look even more realistic and I will also spend more time studying it to build up my knowledge of anatomy.

I also made a version where I experimented with using the colour dodge setting in Photoshop to create this glowing effect.