Managed to sneak in one last portrait of the year. This one's of my friend Chris, Ian's boyfriend. Chris smiles a lot and I really wanted to capture one of him doing so. A lot of folks won't touch reference that has open mouths as it's often really hard to do. I like doing them, not least of which because they're more expressive than the 'looking at you 3/4 with a blank stare' pose. That being said, I still struggle with that kind of pose. This one was giving me trouble until I edited down the number of colors and edited out most of the shadows. Might be that up to half of the work in portraits is the editing and choosing of colors.

I start with the pencil sketch, above, done from a grid and my reference photo which is itself cropped. Then I pencil everything out, even things I'm not going to use later on. Knowing where something is means I can make things more vague later -because- I know where things should be. Then I go to Procreate and create a black and white toned version, each tone getting its own layer.

Lastly, each layer gets vectorized and re-assembled in AD. Then the color process starts. Sometimes, like with this, I sample colors from the original photo though I rarely keep them. I did that here then moved on to palettes created by sampling Rembrandt self portraits and some Van Gogh flower paintings. Even after that, I mess around with saturation and lightness a whole lot. The only thing I worry about at this point is that my style for these might be getting stale. That being said, I think the one of Ian is my favorite in a long time.