First portait - Help wanted

[Greenham]

The general proportions of everything look alright to me. And this is usually the hardest thing to get right - or, at least, I find it the most difficult. The nose could use some work, though. Usually you don't see that much of the nostril unless you are looking from a lower angle - which doesn't match how you've drawn the rest of the face.

This is a good start and I'd like to see you keep working on this. You need to work on your shading and colouring. I'd suggest looking around on the net for some good tutorials on portrait drawing. (This one was one of my favourites: Drawing The Portrait (http://www.portrait-artist.org/face/index.html)). This will give you an idea of the general similarities between all faces and give you focus on what to pay special attention to when you're refining your own work.

Good Luck

[MikeChan565]

thanks for the tips, as for the actauly shading and colouring I find it hard to get the right colour as it always seem to be wrong and i'm not really sure what the best way to blend the colours together, at the moment i just use the "just add water" blender in painter, is this not a good idea?

[Greenham]

Shading/colouring is a very subtle art that takes a very long time to develop, let alone perfect. This is something I, myself, have yet to come anywhere near mastering. As always, I'd recommend looking around on the net for some tutorials. You'll find some more informative than others, but stick with it and keep posting for feedback.

[Aith]

at the moment i just use the "just add water" blender in painter, is this not a good idea?

Hmmm, it was a while since I've used painter, but as I remember it, I'm not sure if just add water is a good idea for now. It's kind of like the watercolour tool in opencanvas, it's good for certain situations but not for a reliable blender! The best blending is done with a low opacity brush (for me I find!) or very pressure sensitive opacity and flow. Tools like smudge and just add water and lovely for special effects on things though! But they're a bit hard to wrangle for skin...

anyway!

If this is your first computer portrait, that is quite incredible!

[MikeChan565]

Thanks, i will try and change some of the brush settings and try and use less of the blend brushes etc.

I decided to try some other stuff and heres what I got so far:

Its just been painted on top of the actual photograph so kinda cheating i guess but i just wanted to try and get better at using painter/tablet

http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/7997/jessicaalbaai5.jpg

[Cerulean-G]

thanks for the tips, as for the actauly shading and colouring I find it hard to get the right colour as it always seem to be wrong and i'm not really sure what the best way to blend the colours together, at the moment i just use the "just add water" blender in painter, is this not a good idea?

"Just add water" is a good (well, I think it's pretty niffty) tool. For the color to be closest to your skin tone, I'd recommend that you take a picture of yourself and upload it. Then, take the dropper tool and find like five different shades from different parts of your skin and go from there. A really good site that I always use when it comes to skin tones and shading is this: http://www.furiae.com/index.php?view=gallery . Her tutorials are amazing and detailed.

[MikeChan565]

"Just add water" is a good (well, I think it's pretty niffty) tool. For the color to be closest to your skin tone, I'd recommend that you take a picture of yourself and upload it. Then, take the dropper tool and find like five different shades from different parts of your skin and go from there. A really good site that I always use when it comes to skin tones and shading is this: http://www.furiae.com/index.php?view=gallery . Her tutorials are amazing and detailed.

Thanks for the link, looks like some good stuff there will be checking it out.

[katklich]

as for shading i find really saturated colors look odd for skin (ive just started using muted tones) i recently found when you take a base color shadow and highlight then blend really well with a smudge tool you get a good tone that you can base your colors from. i found that when you dropper a tone from a pic it usually looks greyish, so i try to imitate that as much as possible. this portrait looks good so far and i agree that the porportions are really good. hopefully you find the jump to digital easier than i did. keep it up ^.^

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