Telaron's try at making an art portrait

[Telaron]

I have to say I think that the third colours suits the character the best.

So you want to go with the brown one?

However, the eyes seem a little vacant as if he is staring of into the distance although its not too important, just a personal preference.

Hardest part of a portrait to get (I think)
I'll give it another go.

Working on the face coloring. By any chance, does anyone know of a tutorial on face coloring. (most of the portraits that I have done in the past have always had helmets so I do not have much experience in face coloring.)

[Valkier]

The eye problem isn't really a problem however. What's going on is that without highlights in the eyes, any portrait looks slightly dead to us. Highlights are just an expected part of any ones eyes when we look at them, so when they're not there our minds instantly think of them as dead or simply inhuman.

So basically once you get down to the shading, the problem will fix itself. It looks like you're using colored pencil however, and judging from the size of the strokes to the scale of the portrait, that level of detail is going to be quite impossible. If I am wrong however, then disregard this.

One other thing that I think will help however is the eyes do look uneven. If he were to look at us straight on his right eye (our left) would be up significantly higher than the other. It's a common problem portrait artists run in to because our mind always tries to correct what it sees, and it spells havoc when translating it on to paper.

But a very good start to be honest. Keep at it.

edit: I can do a rough paint over later if you'd like. Just let me know.

[Telaron]

edit: I can do a rough paint over later if you'd like. Just let me know.

Yeah, sure, that would definitely be appreciated. I also had a hard time picking brushes in Adobe photoshop. Can you recommend any brushes for doing an outline drawing, or as kitty puts it "inking it in" in her tutorial? (If you don't use Adobe photoshop, than just ignore this )

[Valkier]

So I took a couple of minutes on the paintover, and here's what I found:

First, again, this isn't a bad first attempt. And when I say this, I mean there are people in my art class staring at their reflections that don't have the observation you have demonstrated here with a face you made up. So take a moment to pat yourself on the bat. Now I get to my fixes.

Your first problem is the resolution you're working with. You need to be working with 300 DPI minimum I'd say. At 72, you get really fuzzy edges when you try to do any fine detail work. Further more, you just don't get the amount of room you need to really get in there and make things happen. Just remember, the higher the DPI (300 is all you will EVER need) the more information you can give us.

Moving on from that, some anatomical issues. Now, I read it as you trying to make him turn his face slightly away from us. I brought the left eye down some to be in line with the right eye, as well as the eyebrow which I didn't really bother defining much. Again, our minds naturally try to level things out. It's just something you have to watching out for.

The neck was also way too small when I figured out where the ear went. You can have jaws that stick out past the neck line on a frontal view, but when turned to the side you will usually see it go up slightly behind the ear, depending on how much the head is turned. This made the neck about 1/4th wider than you originally had it. The other problem I found here however was when I got curious and lead it down to the collar bone, this guy is in an extremely awkward position. Basically, the collar bones will be perfectly straight across when relaxed. The only time you will see a V shape in the collarbone is either through perspective (leaning towards your view) or if he is holding his shoulders up for whatever reason, such as holding a phone with your shoulder. Now, your guy is moving both of his shoulders up no matter which way I tried to follow, which is fine. I'd just define that reason why if you wanted that to be. Otherwise, you just need to drop them down to they aren't V shaped to each other.

His hair was also looking a little flat, so I included a fairly generic hairline as a demonstration. Remember, the hair will always come out of that line, and will naturally want to curve out of it the longer you want the hair to be. At his length, you'd want to picture his bangs basically forming a mini tunnel on the top of his forehead.

Eye shape was a little confusing, so I guessed at your intent and went from there. This goes for shading as well and may sound as though I'm insulting your intelligence, but it's key to remember the eyes themselves are spherical, and the iris is a small dome on top of that sphere. The reason I remind you of this is because that sphere and dome will effect how the eye lid sits upon the eye. There will be a visible bump on your eyelid while it's resting on the iris. Not all views need to have this shown obviously, but in the case of your portrait, it would be there. Also, because of the sphere shape, you will have a lot of shadows on the eye that most people normally don't consider. Furthermore, the eye is never actually white. Naturally it will pick up the reflection of your own skin pigment and be slightly skin toned, not to mention any influence outside of that in your surroundings.

As for paint brushes in photo shop, I really can't speak to what Kitty uses. As I'm sure her and the other portrait artists will agree, I simply don't work the same way as.. any of them. I usually get by with a normal round brush which I manipulate the size of fore desired effects. Just about every professional in the industry however will have a set of brushes they made themselves to fit various need. I'm simply not advanced enough in the program yet to really be as efficient as that, so that's really all I can tell you about it at the moment.

Now I could go on and on about details of the human face, but I don't want to make a book out of this. I will be happy to give any more help you need with this if you have any more questions or need another paint over. Again, good start to this. There's just a lot of rules to doing faces and a lot of time goes in to learning those rules. Don't let it discourage you.

[Telaron]

Nice. I love your shading job around the eyes. The only thing I don't really like about it is that he looks kinda evil now. I definitely need to reposition the eyes.

I will be happy to give any more help you need with this if you have any more questions or need another paint over.

Thanks, I would definitely need future help when I finally get around to (attempting) to shade the face and clothes.