When I was comfortable with the direction the face was taking, I created a new layer. This layer was placed above the line drawing and was used to do my refining (Fig.12). I broke my own rule by getting ahead of myself and finishing the eyes – I generally don’t like to work sections of my painting unevenly.
Fig.12
Luckily I could just turn off the visibility on that detail layer and get back to working the piece as a whole (Fig.13). I switched from the airbrush to a modified scratchboard tool and the “just add water” blender. I find the scratchboard tool gives a nice random texture that works well with skin. Because of this, these are two of my favourite tools.
Fig.13
With the overall level of detail uniform, I decided to add my highlights. I put a bit of extra time into the hands, but I think it was worth it (Fig.14 – 15). For me, hands are very easy to screw up. If the lighting is wrong on one finger, the whole piece can feel ‘off’!
Fig.14
Fig.15
Almost done now! I always paint hair last because it’s so time consuming. It’s easy for me to lose my place here, so I had to pay special attention to my reference (Fig.16).
Hair is one place that I don’t mind letting my pencil lines show. I find leaving some construction lines, especially around the temples, seems to add to the illusion of realism. Once I’d finished and step back, I notice the tone of his hair was too orange. I was happy with everything else so I dropped all my layers and created a new one set to Colour. Selecting a desaturated blue, I painted over the hair. The layer’s opacity was reduced until I got more of a hazel tone, and then the layer was dropped. After adding a light blue rim light, I bumped up the resolution to 300 dpi and saved (Fig.17).
Fig.16
Fig.17
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One last time I opened the file in Photoshop and after boosting the saturation, the piece was complete (Fig.18).
Fig.18 - Final Image
Even though the studio really liked how the piece turned out, they decided that they want a slightly different pose. So, starting from scratch, I did the whole process all over again, and the result can be seen in Fig.19.
Fig.19
The total time spent on this project was about eight days. I’m still not sure that I will get the movie poster, but the client did decide to use my art for the book cover. Plus I got a couple of pretty good portfolio pieces out of this experience, too!
