He Glows /// Male portrait study with process and variations

When working on a piece of art there a million small decisions to be made. I assume most artist take a similar approach of concept - sketch - final product in some fashion or another but the myriad small decisions that arise during the creation process will drastically alter the final result. Such as what colours/techniques/style to use etc.

Take the 3 versions of my portrait above. I considered this to be a study on creating a masculine looking face. I don't paint men as often as I do women so I wanted to have a crack at it to give myself a little practice. I also decided to try a process that uses a greyscale painting as a base and using the overlay blend mode to add colour. I have seen other digital artists use this method and I was curious if it would be faster or give me better results.

I started with this basic sketch, this sketch looks quite simple but it actually took me some time to arrive at this as I had to redo the proportions several times to get it to this stage:

Next I underpainted on a lower layer only in greyscale. Here I attempted to clearly delineate my highlights and shadows as these are very important for the next step:

The next step for this technique I created a new layer and set the blend mode to overlay and applied my colours where i wanted them. The interesting thing about this is that by applying the skin tone all over his face it automatically picks up the values from underneath so it now looks I have used multiple shades for the skin when all i used are a peachy colour and a bit of red! (also some blue on the hair and eyes)

I did some blending here and refined the eyes adding a little definition and shadow, I made a little gif rather than show all the stages :)

Finally I added a dark background and a light halo emanating from his head:

As you can see above I did multiple reworks of the final image and had a hard time deciding which ones I liked the best so I have decided to include them all. Here is a final gif with the whole process and the three versions!

All in all I enjoyed using this method, it does seem to reduce the overall time choosing colors but more time is needed in the greyscale step so it is a bit of a trade off. I may use this method again in the future but I think I prefer handpicking my colors and applying them, it brings painting closer to a more traditional approach and I feel it offers a different type of control.

I'm quite happy with this study, he has a realistic but somewhat strange look that I enjoy. I am still undecided on which final treatment I like the best :)

Have a great weekend,
Julia