Experimental Portrait Sketch

Artwork Finished Artworks
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My current (now past) self is always a terrible judge of quality! Whenever possible I let things sit quiet for a while so I can evaluate them with fresh eyes, otherwise I’ll grow so sick of staring at them I’ll sincerely believe they’re the worst.

That’s a relief. I’ve been struggling with eyes, the way I used to do them cause them to look too sharp when I go simpler on the shading. I kept wavering on the detail levels trying to make them fit everything else.

I love to sneak cool grays into the skin but sometimes I think I overuse them. I want to go more velvetish on shading but they lean metallic and end pulling the rest into that direction, which is my automatic shading mode. We shouldn’t encourage that! :laughing:

All of them. :rofl:
At some point at least; I’m just figuring out what I like. I kept returning to these:

Shading and Blending

  • main brushes for both uses
  • Basic-3 Flow
  • Basic-4 Flow Opacity
  • Airbrush Soft
    blending help, lines that aren’t lines
  • Tweaked “Texutre Round” from BBB bundle
    sketch, blending
  • Charcoal
  • Plus I’m not sure which wet brush, but used very little anyway. I usually color pick and use regular brushes instead

Minimal Texture Details

  • background
  • Some brush from Memileo’s impasto bundle. (Not linking because I’ll for another artwork and don’t want to spam their notifications)
    character
  • Tweaked “Bug) Rake” from Bug Craftsmanship

Still working on them because the line ones are very good for my needs when they don’t misbehave, which is 95% of the time.

I rely heavily on the freehand selection not only to contain the shading to areas but for things that look like thin brush lines:

(edit: replaced the recording with a better quality demo)

I wish it supported stabilizer!

@Gertsa_Ivan I’m using an app called Input Remapper to make switching tools frictionless, activating the lasso tool, eraser and more using only short and long clicks from the pen buttons. This app is for Linux, on Windows I used one I wrote myself that did something very similar.

I 100% recommend using this kind of aid if you want to go lasso. Without that switching between brush/eraser/lasso all the time feels clunky.

Bonus: Grain Texture

There’s a subtle grain filter over the entire painting to add a bit of grip to it. It’s barely there but I find it makes all the difference in the world, blunting that squeaky clean digital artwork feel. I like the filter effect better than leaning on charcoal-like brushes, it’s softer and I dig the color shift. Reminds me of printed media.

For this I’ve been using G’MIC filters. I’ll create a new pass through group, add a paint layer then use the following code in the “Custom Code” filter.

# Fill with 50% gray
fx_colorful_blobs 2,127,127,127,255,1,nan,nan,121.517,126.64,255,0,0,"nan,nan,nan,nan",nan,nan,85,25,0,255,0,"nan,nan,nan,nan",nan,nan,60,75,0,0,255,"nan,nan,nan,nan",nan,nan,50,50,255,255,0,"nan,nan,nan,nan",nan,nan,50,50,255,0,255,"nan,nan,nan,nan",nan,nan,50,50,0,255,255,"nan,nan,nan,nan",nan,nan,50,50,255,255,255,"nan,nan,nan,nan",nan,nan,50,50,0,0,0,"nan,nan,nan,nan",nan,nan,50,50,255,128,64,"nan,nan,nan,nan",nan,nan,50,50,255,64,128,"nan,nan,nan,nan",nan,nan,50,50,128,64,255,"nan,nan,nan,nan",nan,nan,50,50,64,128,255,"nan,nan,nan,nan"

# Add noise. Replace 600 with the desired scale, suggested max side/(10 to 20)
fx_simulate_grain 0,1,0.613, 600 ,259.58,1,26.6,21.4,0,20,72,0,0

Set it to overlay, reduce the opacity, add a transparency mask and remove the excess with an airbrush. I often clone the layer and use another modes like color burn, color dodge or whatever too, tweaking their opacity and the transparency mask on the original until I get something I like.

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