lamaery

Hello, thank you. :) Well, since these magnus archive portraits are all done in more or less the same manner, I can elaborate on those. I usually start with a pencil sketch in my sketchbook to find the general idea and expression that I am looking for with what I want to depict. I take a picture of that into procreate and sketch over that a second time, manifesting more firmly what I want the drawing to be, mirroring that sketch a few time to make corrections.

Then I put my sketch on low opacity and draw my linework over it with the blackburn brush. Overall I only used two brushes for these character portraits: the Blackburn drawing brush, for its roughness and expressiveness and the Syrup ink brush for sharper edges and more precise work.

The linework can be rough and scratchy. I often end up erasing and correcting parts of it later in the painting process, when it doesn't match up with what I want to paint. After that I start blocking in my base colours, attributing my general ideas for object colours, values and thinking in broad terms about where I want my light sources want to be, how warm or cold I want them to be and how the background colour will affect | reflect my overall light situation. (For the jonmartin example here, the main light was a less strong, frontal light, slightly from a both with ambient light from around them, to give the image something like an overcast feel and enhance the slightly heightened position of the viewer. For the season 2 Martin drawing instead I went with a cold blue light coming from the left, and a warmer more frontal light from the right, making it more of an indoor situation with maybe a window and a lamp or second sunshine filled window being possible light sources)

After that it is detail work: fleshing out the light and shadow parts. I like to pick my colours from the image via colour picker and work then with various degrees of opacity on the brush to blend and form. But do this for long enough and your painting becomes more grey and grey, so it helps to to throw in some fresh, more saturated colour from the colour wheel, for example at strong light and shadow edges or for rebounding light to counteract that. It basically comes down to making lots of educated guesses to what feels right. I also tend to mirrow-swapp the image now and then to get a fresh impression and find obvious errors for example in the anatomy.

For a stronger contrast in light and shadows and pulling everything together I often use very light colours on an extra layer with multiply and very dark colours on a layer with adding colour. As for colour decisions and ambient light Marco Bucci here has a video on it, that puts very good and much more educated explanations to my own thought processes while painting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwLQ0cDb4cE These character portraits take somewhere between two to five hours. I usually get swept up by the process of making them and suddenly it's two hours later. This rendering was done in four and a half hours. Also I spent a lot of time in the last half year doing these kind of portraits as studies from photographic references. It was mainly to get a better feel for different kinds of faces and skin colours, but it also helped a lot to get a better idea of shadows and light. (For example like this study for Rosario Dawson:)

so yeah. I hope this was insightful. :)