Portrait Study – Colors and Light. Digital

[maxlucon]

[Mengu Gungor]

This is great Max, I think you picked a challenging lighting situation, but it still reads quite well. I spent a little time on a paintover, and here are some thoughts as I was going through.

The lighting is fighting the structure a little bit, so the brow ridge and the eyes don’t appear lined up. Also the mouth and chin may be a little off center. I think maybe you started to exaggerate the angle of the head a bit at some point, but then straightened it out a bit. So I liquified and adjusted the features around a bit until they looked a bit better structurally. You could probably do a bit more work with the eyes, making sure the eyelids wrap properly around the eyeball. My main recommendation to you would be to spend more time on the drawing stage before you get to painting.

The values were largely good. I darkened the neck area a bit, it seemed too light, and that diagonal edge wasn’t reading quite right across the neck. Also darkened the teeth a bit, they are always darker than what we think we see. And finally I did a levels adjustment to bring up all shadows a bit, since there is a lot of information there still, and we can reserve the darkest darks for the deepest recesses, which I emphasized, like the eye socket.

The colors seemed a bit monochromatic, we can introduce and exaggerate the hues in the reference to get a more painterly look. So I exaggerated/introduced some greenish hues in the shadows, and some warmer, yellowish/orangish hues in the light. Then I messed around with the background a bit to introduce those colors there and create some more harmony (basically just a fix for what I was changing). It may look rougher than what you have, since it needs more time for refinement, but you can place it on a different layer on your image, and turn it off/on to see the changes better. I really hope this helps. Keep on sketching!

[Mengu Gungor]

One more quick tip… Before I started, I looked up a few more pictures of Ian Hanmore, just to see what the structure of his face was like, so that may be helpful when you have a difficult lighting situation like this, where lighting may be obscuring the structure a bit.

[maxlucon]

Hi Mengu! Thats awesome!

Great work man! I appreciate it. Loved the introduction of colors and everything else. I will keep in mind all that you said and keep working.

Indeed I could have spent more time in the drawing. Basically I just sketched it and started throwing colors and values. And then resolve the anatomy as I go.

 

 

You can check more of the process here http://www.artstation.com/artwork/6amXdV

Thanks a lot!

[Author]

Posts