The premise of the class was to encourage you to paint your best portrait ever. I'm not entirely new to portrait painting, but I must admit that I've never been disciplined with my process. This class broke down the portrait process into 5 days
In regards to my lack of discipline, I've normally skipped right past the steps covered in Day 2. I'm not sure why, but up until this point, it has felt unnatural to me. I've found that skipping that step has resulted in me creating overly smooth contours and creases of the face. This class cleared it all up and showed that I was missing out on discovering important shapes in the face in order to properly place the mid tones, shadows, and highlights. It also makes for a much more pleasing rendering stage.
Most of this painting, all the way through the details completed in Day 4, was completed using Procreate on an iPad Pro, with an Apple Pencil. The final stage was achieved in Photoshop. I wanted to complete the whole piece in Procreate, but I soon realized it doesn't really have a tool that matches Photoshop's mixer brush. More specifically, it doesn't have a mixer brush that can paint in its own empty layer, all while non-destructively sampling all layers. It's very useful when you're trying to explore happy accidents during the style stage.
This five day class set out to help me make my best portrait ever, and in my humble opinion… It did just that.
I'm very excited to have set a new bar for myself, and I can't wait to pump out more paintings of this quality and better.
