Here's how it went down:
Drawrwring. (ps, it looks like donkey dump.)
Corrected the drawing. Yes, the photo ref is placed over top on low opacity. Every time I felt the illustration was getting away from me, I ticked it on just to double check. Also saves craploads of time. I would do this traditionally as well. The nose, eyes and mouth placement was decent, but wow I apparently forgot to give him a brain. Also I kept wanting to make his jaw too tiny. Derp.
Value establishment and first indications of light and shadow. Still looks like dump. Anyway, I'll just carve it out as I go along, keeping in mind lightest light and darkest dark. I learned in school that you *should* establish them both first but I'm old enough to know and old enough not to care. I want to eventually get away from the line drawing and the only thing to do is render. Using the lines I already drew helps to see where the darkest darks are (eg crease of nostril, pupils, mouth line) or else I start to estimate what value they will be eventually (stubbly sides of face are not that dark).
Rendering (normal)
More rendering sorcery (normal). I want to channel my inner Gil Elvgren (and other living inspirations, Ayran Oberto and Even Admunsen) but I was getting cranky that it was more like Mike Butkus or Drew Struzan. Not bad complaints per se (and I am getting ahead of myself if I think for a second it's anywhere near as good as ANYONE-- but I digress--), but I primarily want to get better at painting in big, confident, opaque shapes than just drawing and blending. Old habits die hard. Also hair, just wanna get the big shapes and movement in.
About done! Seems good. By this point I had also used Liquify to mush around a couple things a millimeter or two, jaw was wrong again, had to wrangle that...
Added beard stubble on a multiply layer with texture brush.
Color layer added in -you guessed it- color blending mode. First time I ever did this, and saved me literally days of on and off frustration. It's like cheating. BUT IS IT? bawhawh-- All I had to do was pick a local-ish (seriously, not even so exact) color and my values are kept in tact.
This is what the layer looks like when the blending mode was changed from 'color' to 'normal', btw. he's like, freakin' pink and tubed 'flesh color', and it totally works.
Kay so I had to rim light something. Turned off the color layer to tweak this. Messed with his tousled locks a tiny bit (multiply).
Little overpaint tweaks (mostly normal, otherwise a molecule of multiply or screen, hint of color dodge for xxxxtra rim light obvs)
And after a few more tweaks (multiply around eyes and jacket), re-saturated the background to a subtle yellowish gray, screen for shirt texture, now we're teh done.
Sometimes he was looking like Harrison Ford, Michael Hall, a dash of James Dean, and voilà!
