Went easy mode for my first Krita painting. My specialty, disembodied heads portraits from imagination.
It’s been a ride! I love the brushes, but there’s a fair number of hiccups elsewhere in the UIX. The most severe look like bugs, so hopefully in time they’ll be gone.
OMG Very realistic style!!!
@Celes Fabulous - downright photographic rendering. Kudos.
@gun_derr @Someguy Thanks! It’s the light, get it more or less right and it feels realistic even if up close it’s a mess of nonsensical texture and disconnected bits from frantic freehand selections. 
That’s a good description for real life 
Beautiful! There are some great techniques you have used that I’d love to hear about how you implemented them, if you have the time? Like the sheen in the hair, for instance. And how you get such consistency in the skin tone with so much Level variation, without it being mottled in colour, which I struggle with.
@MangooSalade
I try to go from large to small. A sloppy sketch on top, base shading underneath done with big round soft brushes, some intermediary layers I’ll probably discard/lower opacity with a simple brush to get a sense of depth because I can’t visualize too much ahead, then freehand selection my way to completion. I threw a bit of noise and a texture to add a bit of “grip” to the result, though I messed the noise.
I use every and any brush with the freehand selection. Here mostly airbrush, plain round, and charcoal.
I usually start with a smaller canvas and resize up when I’m refining things. It’s for performance, though sometimes the blurring actually helps in softening edges and textures. Happy accidents and all!
The sheen on hair and skin, that’s unfortunately just knowledge of which hues go well where. I know this shade of skin works well with gray-blue reflections from ambient light. It also benefits from a bit of yellow-green and orange shifts, which I usually add with an overlay layer using airbrush very lightly. It’s important to not make everything saturated because then no color pops.
Besides overlay I might also use color dodge for subsurface scattering, lighten or darken to push hue shifts without messing the colors around too much.
Hair hues I find even more challenging than skin, for this shade of brown I like some subtle purple and green reflections at a pressure that must make them something around 5% opacity or less. I color pick a lot, doing a soft stroke, sampling the blended color result then doing the actual stroke. The hues themselves I try to keep confined to designated areas; If you do many hair locks of different hues side-by-side it looks like it’s the hair color instead of reflections.
Be careful when giving hair some definition, if you go too hard on the strands the hair looks fragmented. It works for stuff like the locks over the ear for example, where I want it to stick out of the hair mass, but for other areas it’s easy to overdo (I’m still working on improving my control over hair mass).
Details always go on top, even most that look like “oh that’s just an effortless brushstroke from earliest steps I left there”. Because I’m too heavy handed I’ll also tone down some transitions that look too harsh or muddy with airbrush again, blender, whatever I feel more comfortable with at the moment.
I used to have a very impressionist style, thousands of brushstrokes with pastel-like look, but I’ve grown both weary of it and old enough it kills my hand, so I’m doing my best to reign it in. That’s how the selection helps, I don’t need to lay down so many brushstrokes, I just use the contained space to the same effect but cleaner. Plus I’m trying to lose my utter terror of airbrushes. I used to use round gradients just to not touch them. 
Thank you veru for so many good tips! I’m going to try them out (as best I can) in my next portrait. I hope you post more here so I can look for the techniques in them!
Congratulations, It was amazing! (And I loved your tips in reply, thanks )
I love it!
She reminds me Arya Stark😚
Thanks! Please keep in mind I haven’t taken off my Krita training wheels yet. Been mostly trying to recreate my familiar workflow without diving into all the neat Krita-specific features just yet. I’ve been spending a not insignificant amount of time stumped when things don’t work as I expect or I accidentally fire a shortcut I don’t understand.
About sticking around, I’m not sure yet. I’m not a big fan of how Discourse treats user-posted content, but mostly I just have a lousy track record of being consistent in social media usage, haha.
The community though seems fine and I was surprised to stumble on an active sketchbook section here.
Hm, I see the resemblance, though I can’t divorce Maisie Williams’s large eyes from my mental model of her. They’re also very centered on her face.
Maybe she’s actually Lyanna Stark then?
You have a Instagram or Artistation account? I wanna follow your work
Nope. Never been on Instagram and left Artstation when they warmly welcomed artificial content.
I’m only on the low-traffic liminal spaces of the internet, Tumblr and Mastodon – and even then I’ve been on a extended hiatus on both. I can’t keep up with social media at the moment and I dislike to be that person who just throws out their stuff without ever engaging with people around them. 
I also used to mostly post a different kind of work on them, pencil sketches from my sketchbook but this year I haven’t the time to sit down and draw every day. I’ll probably start sharing the big pile of digital portraits I’ve been doing when I’m ready to return.
That’s amazing! 
I love this portrait. You show great potential in your use of Krita brushes. Keep up the good work.
Congratulations! Your artwork has been inducted into the featured artwork gallery row.
May I have your permission to post this artwork on Krita’s social accounts? If yes, I will credit your K-A user name (or a different name that you specify). If no, no problem.
Please type @sooz in your reply so I get pinged.
How wonderful. A perfect work. I love it
Looks pretty sweet, would love to see a simple screen capture of such a process…even if it’s sped up.
@sooz Thank you! Didn’t see that coming. 
Yes you can feature it. I have a Mastodon account, it’s on hiatus right now but feel free to credit it. I should crawl from under a rock still this year.
Thanks @Mythmaker for nominating my work. The admiration is mutual, I even got your experimental still life bookmarked here for the delicious brush work! 
@okuma_10 Thank you! Videos might be more hassle than helpful tbh.
I used to do timelapses (stress-free, no impact on system performance, takes very little space) but I sometimes wander in circles so much and break personal work up in tiny sessions it’s hard to record. And I love to I let stuff languish in my WIP folder for months on end (who doesn’t?). I’m just finishing something I started last year. 
yeah I didn’t meant like a narrated video, but as a time-lapse recording, but I guess you are right, if that’s something you are stopping and starting with large time gaps in between…recording it would be annoying to do.
