A week later...

Well, a week later and i have 7 portraits, so far it seems to be working as planned (dont know how i will feel about it 50 in of course). As its a week to the day that i took the ref photos, i just wanted to do a quick post to show the sort of thing im doing- not exactly a process break down, just a couple of quick photos that i took yesterday which shows a little progression on one piece.

As some of you may know, i generally use Painter IX.5 for my more painterly pieces but as these are relatively quick and dont need to be finished to a high standard- im using Photoshop CS2. Before i started all of this i created a brush library consisting of Photoshop brushes that had a real textured feel. I either made them myself or found them online (ive amassed quite a large collection of custom PS and Painter brushes over the years) and my custom brush library for this project consists of about 20 different brushes, so far i think ive used about 9 or 10 of them to get the effects i wanted.

In order to get an accurate likeness to my ref photo i have the ref on the left and the work document on the right and utilize Photoshops handy grid overlay to quickly block in the main areas of light and shadow and develop the general form. I really wanted each piece to only take one hour, but so far its more like 1.20 or so to produce a reasonable portrait, hopefully i will get a bit quicker as time goes on! Heres a few quick IG shots i took of the screen as i produced portrait no6 yesterday.





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