Painting the Face
What I did first, was taking care of the blending, while enriching the colour palette constantly with new shades: I deepened the shadows by adding some darker violets and gave more life to the cheeks by adding more oranges and pinks to them. As for the brushes, I always apply colours with the Hard round brush with it’s opacity set to pressure (and with a low flow).
For blending and palette enriching I usually use roundish custom brushes with uneven, torn edges.
Now, when the image was all smoothened, I started adding texture. On the skin I painted in some delicate never-to-be-visible veins and skin pores (by painting many many many lighter and darker blobs with my custom speckled brush and some tiny single dots on top of it, one by one, with a plain round brush). I love adding little moles and such, so I couldn’t resist to put in a few, too.
The mouth I shaded by highlighting the puffy areas of each lip and then by painting small dots of different sizes and shapes on the highlighted areas. I used some airbrush on top of the dots, to make them stand out less.
Painting the Hair
The hair was done with the simplest hard and soft brushes with the opacity set to pressure.
I find it very efficient to first paint the main curves of the hair (with a darker colour), marking the curls and the general shape of the strands. From there on, I gradually switched onto smaller lighter brushes, adding more and more strands. During this process I also kept on changing the brush modes to e.g. colour dodge or soft light while painting separate strands in order to further enrich the colour palette.
What I found is very efficient to do, is to paint some thin strands, then use the blur tool on them and then paint other strands on top of the blurred pile. Too much detail in the hair will kill the realism of it – it’s much more efficient to hint the details instead. And that’s exactly what the blur tool does - it grants the hair a realistic, soft effect, without making it seem overdone.
Also, it was important to ensure that the falls didn’t look too artificial (image 3). I decided to add much more hair strands, some even opposing the direction of the strand’s fall, to make it look a bit messy and natural.
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