Paint with Me: Digital Portrait Painting in Procreate

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi, my name is Gabrielle Brickey. I've been drawing and painting portraits for over 20 years, and today I want to paint one with you. In this class, we'll be painting a portrait together in Procreate. If you don't have Procreate, no worries, all mediums are welcomed and encouraged. In this class, I'll be doing something completely new. I'll be sharing my portrait making process with you in real-time, so you'll see the full painting process at my exact pace, mistakes and all. In this real-time portrait demo, you'll learn how to approach the blank canvas with confidence. As you follow along with me step-by-step, I'll show you how to paint with simple shapes, which brushes to use where and why, and how to paint a face easily with accurate proportions. You'll learn techniques for different styles of brushwork and we'll also talk about how to simplify your painting and not get caught up and lost in all the intimidating details. This class is best suited for artists who've painted portraits before, but you're welcome to follow along whether you're an absolute beginner or more advanced artists, since you'll see the process step-by-step in real-time. I'll be sharing my exact set of Procreate brushes, so if you're working with this app too, you'll be able to download and use these brushes for free. You'll also get the exact reference I'm using, ready to go. Whether you're looking to hone your portrait painting skills, or just ready to relax and have a bit of creative fun, join in because I'd love for you to paint with me. [MUSIC] 2. Installing the Brushes: To grab the exact brushes I'll be using in my painting, head to the Projects and Resources section on Skillshare. You can find a link in the class resources or grab the procreate.brush set attachment directly from Skillshare under the resources right here. If you're watching from the app, tap the Projects tab, then tap this link right here, which will redirect you to Skillshare on your web browser. If you're grabbing them from Dropbox, tap the procreate.brush set, press "Download," and then download again. You'll notice the progress of the download right here. Once it's complete, tap it and press "Downloads." Then tap the file, and click this to send it to your iPad via AirDrop, email, whatever you prefer. I'm going to AirDrop it to my iPad, click "Accept", open with Procreate. Then you can find them by tapping the brush icon and they'll be loaded right at the top here. This process might look a little different as updates happen, but hopefully, this gives you an idea of how it works. Just a little bit more about the brushes now. This 6b is a modified version of a Procreate default brush. Instead of holding it in the traditional way like this, you can actually hold it like this. Putting some pressure down on this part here, you can make these nice strokes. I like this type of stroke because here it's very sharp on the edge, and here it starts to fade out, which I really like. I'd like to use this for cutting color into a painting. But it's cool though, as you can also hold the pencil in the more traditional way of holding a pencil and you can get these nice thin lines too. It's a really versatile brush. Sometimes the brush can get stuck in the opposite mode you're trying to do for a second. Usually, I find if I just undo and try it again, it'll work itself out. But this brush I find is worth it even with its little quirks. Another brush I really enjoy is my willow charcoal streamline brush. I like this brush for a lot of reasons. One of them is you can get really beautiful variety with it. As you can see when I press down really hard, I can get this nice dark thick line whereas when I press softer, I get a really nice thin line. I also love this brush just for its rhythmical quality. It's very smooth and watery, very rhythmical and flowy, which is how I like to paint. That's why I really enjoy using this brush as well. It's great for finding rhythms and curves and just flowing around your pace. If you don't have Procreate, don't let that hold you back from painting along. I love to see what you create with your choice medium and brushes. Whether you use digital or traditional media, I think it would be so interesting to see which techniques and decisions you use with the tools that you have. Be sure to follow along and share your work as well. I really enjoy seeing that. 3. Procreate Settings: I'm using a 12.9 inch, 4th Generation iPad Pro and a 2nd Generation Apple Pencil. I just want to provide a quick look at my settings in Procreate so you can match up with my gestures if you'd like. Go into the Wrench icon here or Actions, make sure the ''Prefs tab'' is selected, and then go ahead and tap ''Gesture controls''. Here you can see how I have all this setup and I'll quickly tap through these, you can match up with mine if you want to. Here under eyedropper you can see I have my touch and hold set to on. Holding a finger on my canvas will bring up the eyedropper tool, which I use all the time and find really useful. I have the delay for that touch and hold set to the minimum amount, so it's really quick. Continuing on here, my settings for draw and hold. Then here under Quick Menu, if I tap the ''Modify'' button, it will invoke or dismiss the Quick Menu. Moving forward. I don't really use these, but this is how I have it all set up. Here on Copy and Paste, I use this one quite often. Swiping down on my screen with three fingers, when I'm painting will bring up Copy and Paste options and you'll see I use that pretty often. I have that on. Here are just the last couple of settings. Something else I want to show you is my pressure and smoothing. You can see I have this pressure sensitivity arched upwards and this is just because I have a light touch naturally while painting and if I press too hard while drawing, after a while, it starts to hurt my hand. Arching this up can help accommodate for that for me personally. But if you find you're the opposite and say you're maybe heavy handed, you could try arching that downward in the opposite direction and see if that would help you. But for me, I like to keep it arc this way so that I can get that heavy thick paint without killing my hand. Most of you will probably even be able to lead this just at the standard level, which is just straight across corner to corner. But experiment with this if you find that either of those things I mentioned become an issue for you. Another thing you'll want to do is just make sure under Actions, Video, the time-lapse recording is set to on because that's always really fun to look back at and see the progress of your painting. All that out of the way, let's move on and get this reference downloaded. 4. Downloading the Reference: The class project for this course is to paint this image along with me. Let's download the reference and get going. If you're on a computer head to the projects and resources section on Skillshare. There you'll find a link to the references under class resources. You'll also find the reference and the resources section here. If you're following along with me in Procreate, go ahead and download the Procreate Painting.procreate file. If you're working in another program, download these and stack them up on separate layers. On the Skillshare app in the projects tab, just click this link right here. You'll be redirected to skillshare.com where you can scroll to find the files. Quick look here at my Dropbox link. Here in this folder, you'll find the references for class. I have different versions of the same image and we'll talk more about that in a minute. But for now, if you're working along with me in Procreate, select that Procreate Painting.procreate file. Then press Download, press Download again and you'll notice the progress of the download right here if you have an iPhone. Then you'll just tap here and press Downloads. Tap Procreate Painting and then go ahead and press this little arrow here and there you can airdrop it, email it, use a Cloud service, whichever you prefer to get it over to your iPad. I'm going to airdrop it to my iPad press Accept, Procreate and it will import into the Procreate app. This process will look different depending on which devices you use. But hopefully your process is something similar to this. But of course, if you need help, please let me know. Let's take a look at this Procreate Painting.procreate file. If you tap here and open up your layers, you'll see at the very top of our stack we have the painting. This is the layer we'll be painting on. You'll notice the background behind this layer is checkered. This means it's Alpha locked, meaning we'll only be able to paint on this shape. Nothing will go outside the boundaries of this rectangular canvas, which will be really useful later on when we're trying to nail down proportions. If you ever want to turn Alpha lock off, swipe right with two fingers. This will enable you to be able to use certain tools in Procreate or be able to just draw outside the shape if you want to later on. If you're not using Procreate, go ahead and Google how to Alpha lock or how to lock transparent pixels and that'll give you the information you need to be able to do this as well. But for now, we're going to go ahead and keep that Alpha locked. Painting layer is where we're going to be doing our painting. Moving down here we have the reference, no filters or anything, just the plain reference. I got this image from shutterstock.com for us to paint together. If you uncheck that, you can see here we have referenced blurred, which is as the name states just the reference blurred. I find it can be really helpful to work from blurred reference. It's essentially the same as squinting down at your subject, which helps you simplify and connect similar values, which can help you create a more readable painting. It also helps you not be as intimidated perhaps to approach a subject because it's just a bunch of blobs of blurry color. You can achieve this in future paintings by going to adjustments Gaussian blur. Here on this next one we have Ref Simplified. Now, this is a cross hatch filter that I love in photoshop. This filter gives the look fluid paint with simplified shapes. It also beautifully shows the edge variety you can get, which I really love and want to capture in my own paintings. I find this as a good reference to look at. Then finally here we have rough simplified too and this is just an even more simplified version of the image with that cross hatch filter again. With these versions of the image, all the minor details go away, revealing the beautiful simplified impact of the composition. It's totally not necessary to do this every time you grab a new reference to start painting. But I find sometimes it's helpful to have options that are simplified to look at as reference. Really quick in photoshop, if you ever want to experiment with this cross hatch filter, want a duplicate of your reference, go to image, image size, and then resize that reference to be smaller actually, the size will do well. This filter just works best on a smaller image. Then go to filter, filter gallery and under the brushstrokes folder, click cross hatch. From there you can adjust the stroke length, sharpness, and strength to help you achieve a really beautiful simplified statement. Back in Procreate, let's just check all these back on. Select our painting layer and let's get started on the piece. 5. Getting Started: Can I be honest here, I'm scared to start this painting. First off, know that that feeling is normal. I've painted probably 1,000 faces and sometimes that fear can still creep in, but have confidence in this fact. Right now, at the beginning of this painting, you've got no skin in the game. You've not invested anytime in this piece yet. It's not precious yet. There's nothing to lose. Row with these two words, if you have fear approaching the blank canvas, just start. I'm going to begin by grabbing my six B large with flat edge brush. I find that this is a really nice painterly brush to begin carving endless shapes of value. Then in your layers, just make sure you're on your painting layer. Then I'm going to bring my brush size up a little bit. Then I just want to select a basic skin color here and just start. I'm beginning with the shape I'm seeing for her face. Thinking an angles. Let's get more of a mid tone instead of that light color, it's better to get a richer tone for these base colors I find. Then here I'm seeing this shadow shape. All of this is grouping into shadow. I'm just going to very quickly start establishing that there's a light side and there's a shadow side. Obviously the placement is not accurate at all. But we're putting something down so we have something to build from. Then her neck is going to come down like this. Here I'm picking up this color for the hair. See this nice little swing that happens. It's like the number nine almost. That's the swing and flow I'm going to try and capture throughout this whole piece. In here gets super dark. Let's go in with that now. Don't be afraid to get that dark in there because that's how you're going to start establishing your values. Don't be shy with these dark values. Sometimes we can be so timid with the paint so that we never get anywhere with the painting. But if you boldly put in your darkest dark value, that will help push you forward. Now moving on to the scarf, notice that even though it's a white scarf, it's not actually white. It's a gray mid tone. A quick note about the color picker and my thoughts on it. I actually learned about color originally by using soft pastels and oil paint. I feel okay about using the color picker because I feel like I have that background knowledge. This is just a tool for me to get where I'm going faster. But if you don't want to use the color picker, then by all means don't use it. Make your best guesses for color and go from there. Use this as a color study if you want to. There's this little break here separating the shirt from skin. This is where all her neck land is. It's so dark in there. What I'm doing that you can't see that I'm doing is I'm squinting my eyes down at this piece because I want to be able to see the value structure. There's a very clear value structure that's happening. Let me just go ahead and put in that dark right now. All this goes dark. I'm just going to go for it. There's no point in holding back in this beginning stage. Just go for it. You've invested only a few minutes in this so far. Put those colors down on the canvas. Then here in the back, this value is a bit darker than over here. I'm picking up this darker value because that's going to pop really nicely against the light of her scarf. Something else you can look at when you're placing this stuff is negative space. Real quick, let me add a layer on top here and look at this negative space with you. Actually let me grab this brush. It's a little easier. What we want to do is look at the negative space. When I'm placing her on the canvas, I'm thinking about this shape here. This general shape. I don't mean her, I mean this negative shape behind her. I'm thinking how can I draw that shape? Since this is just a random abstract shape, it's less precious to us than a person, so is therefore easier to draw it in its exactness without your brain saying, hey, I know that that's a face, it looks like this. Then join something that looks like a potato. But really observing and drawing the negative space instead of the subjects themselves can make placing them on the canvas so much easier. When I'm placing her on the canvas, I'm thinking about painting that shape, not her, the background. Let's delete that. Back on the painting layer. Let me grab the 6B brush again. Now that we've taken a look at the negative space, how can we place this a little better? Well, I'm noticing that I gave too much gray background on the left. The face needs to plunge forward a little more. I'm noticing already that I've drawn the shoulder way too low. I'm going to have to think all the way across here and draw the shoulder. It's going to be more about right here. As a result, that chin is about right there, I'd say maybe. Then here with this negative space, my space is a little too large. I'm going to just go like that for the moment. Again, the shoulder needs to be pulled up because I'm seeing here, if I go here, bring a line straight across. It's more about there, tip of the shoulder is more about here. I'm seeing her head can be rounded out, so I'm going to grab one of these mid tone oranges and add that up here. I'm shifting to painting the positive shapes right now, but not without considering and observing that negative space. Everything's still in blob land. Let's consider where this cut happens between the scarf and the dark value of her hair. I'm just going to line up here and just drag my hand across and it sweeps around like this. Any chance you get to find a rhythm or something beautiful or flowy in your piece grab onto that. Here we have this hair again. It pulls from here. Then here that hair pops into light. We're not going to think about hairs. We're thinking about shapes too. This is just a blob of light. Right here this has more darkness in here. Then it warms up a bit right here. The cylinder of her neck is right here. There's the cylinder of her neck going into her chest. This is her chest and it's a bit darker. I'm going to darken that up so we can start to feel that plain change. This is going to be the neck. As we can see, it's pretty sharp right there and soft on the other side. It's sharp right here. This brush is perfect for this and it's softer over here. Right here we have another little shadow. I don't want to shy away from it because that's an essential part of this lighting scenario. I'm going to now, and I'm just going to put in that little darkness. Another thing I want to grab onto is this ear. I'm going to grab the darkness of that ear. Just floated on over and place that. This is where that ear is going to land. I want to get this part in the light a little bit. Right around there is the ear. Then here again, now you can see these shadows. We're not going to be scared to paint them as they really are since we already got other dark values up on the canvas. This is an important little part of the neck to help find the cylinder of the neck. We're going to put that in right here. Now looking at these colors, I'm just checking and comparing the values of the neck. If you look at the loop, you can see I haven't gone nearly dark enough on the neck value compared to the reference. I'm going to grab this darker color right here. I'm going to color in all of this now because this should get a darker value. Then up in this cheekbone we have that color. Let's start carving that in as well. We don't want to shy away from these tones because if we do, we're never going to get the light. Then here let's see about our richer tone for the skin. If you color pick from the skin, don't pick the highlight zone. That's not going to be a good base color. We want to grab something a bit richer in tone so that the highlights eventually will really have room to sing. Then here this is going to be a little halftone color change, and eventually we're going to work into this cheekbone. Here the head scarf wraps around a little more and it comes out a bit more. But I'm keeping in mind that negative space. I'm going to cut back in, and I can see I probably need to add a little more scarf here. Now let's go ahead and flip this. I'm going to go here and I'm going to press "Flip Horizontally". This is a great way to change up your perspective. It reveals mistakes. Since you're not used to seeing it in this view, you'll see it with a fresh eye. What I'm seeing is this space right here is just too big compared to this space. It's light, but it's definitely different. I see, I just need to pull her face out a bit more. I'm going to go ahead and pull that out the way it needs to be. As soon as you see something's off, go ahead and make that change because it's easier to move things around in this beginning stage of the piece, than it will be later on in the piece, and I'm saying she has a lot more hair here, so I'm going to put that dark shape in. Here's a nice transition color here. Now I really want to squint down. This part of the scarf here is definitely a darker value. I want to get the different values of light and shadow on this head scarf. That's a nice pretty little turn in that cloth so we want to make sure we grab onto that. This cloth is turning a bit more than I haven't so let's just start to get a little bit of turn around the head because all of this needs to turn and conform to the roundness of the head. Something quite challenging about this piece is the tilt of her head. This is not an easy reference, but we're going to keep at it as this type of challenge is a great learning opportunity. I noticed that getting darker, so I just want to make sure it gets nice and dark. Here I'm just grabbing this dark color and pulling in the neck some. Something that we want to consider is how we're seeing a little bit of the underside of her jaw. I'm drawing a little to try and convey that. Now I'm just painting a tone on where the masseter muscle would be. I see this light value shape here. I'm trying to put that in now. Here this cheekbone is a bit bigger so I'm going to put that in better. Now let's go ahead and turn on another version. We don't want to get too caught up in the details, so uncheck reference to reveal reference blurred. Just make sure you keep your painting layer selected though. Let's go ahead and try working from that for a bit. I'm going to go ahead and flip this again and we're going to get going on this. What I see here is look at this blob of color on her nose. It's so simple. It's just a simple little blob, and we're not going to make a big deal about it. We're just going to go like that. There's that little blob. Then here we have another little blob, this little blob right here. It's not an eye, it's a blob. We're going to go over here and just put that little blob in. Then I see an almost S curve here, so let's get that little curve in there. I know it's scary. We're getting there. Here's a darker tone I noticed right in here. You're going to get that in there, and then I find that all of this connects. It's not like there's a blob here and it doesn't connect. It all connects here to this other blob. Even this connects here to that blob, so we're finding connections between these similar values. That's what we're doing here. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to pick up this color right here, and I noticed it's orangey. I'm just going to push it a little more orangey actually. I just want to get it right around this hairline. Then I'm going to pick up this color again and bring back the roundness of the forehead. Now I'm picking up that tone on the nose. It's nice to get a slightly darker tone on the nose because when you put in the highlights on the nose later, they really pop nicely. I can see that the whole head is shifting straight on my painting. As humans, our natural tendency can be to straighten things out. But she has a subtle tone that I want to capture. How can we fix this? All the imaginary lines on the front planes of her face need to conform to perspective. They need to tilt. So this forehead needs to tilt. This line of the eyebrows needs to tilt. This line of the nose needs to tilt. I find first with this, it's easier to just make sure everything tracks in the same general direction. Then later we'll look a little closer at the unique perspective of this reference. We don't want to get too far along without taking a look at the tilt. Keep that in the back of your head as you're painting and keep checking in on it. Continuing on, I want to get that nice and dark. I do want to shape this up a little bit so I'm really lightly putting that in. I do notice that eventually we're going to have another eye here. I want to get that in, and I know she's going through the ugly duckling phase right now, and that's normal for a painting. It's okay. Now I'm going to go with a little more of a peachy color on the nose. Often the nose we'll have a more saturated tone than the rest of the face, and I think what's going to help us push this forward is putting a tone here on the lips. I'm going to go in here and put a simple little blob, not lips, a blob of color. No drawing or outlining, just painting simple shapes of value, simple shapes of color, and she definitely has an upturned nose. I'm hinting at that. Here I'm just going to grab this color again and tuck that in a bit. In here, there's this nice little warm color that happens. I'm just going to pull that back a little. I want to get a couple more things down. Like this little dark shape behind the ear. Then I want to hint at some of these shapes on the scarf. I'm not thinking about them too much, I'm just getting something up on the Canvas so we can push it around. Here's that swing of the hair. Here's a little darker value I see in there. I'm just popping around the piece and looking at edges as well. See this little blurry edge here, that's cool. I'm just starting to look at edges as well. You can achieve a softer edge by making the two shapes touching very similar in value or you can crisp up an edge by adding more contrast between the values. Let's get this nice and dark because I want to establish all these base values. Then I want to add a little bit more warmth here around the nose. Here I want to establish this a bit better because I'm losing this hairline. Let me grab on the hair color and put that in a bit better. Something else I can get in is this little transition here that happens on the forehead. That value change helps us transition from shadow to light. Now I'm just making this a little lighter. Now looking at the negative space of the background again, I noticed the background can tuck in. Then the lips here could go like that. Now here I want to get down where the V neck ends. I just trail straight over and put that in. Now I want to get this shape I see in the hair a little bit better I'm starting to see this dark abstract shape here that groups several values altogether. If you see something like this, try to capture that. Grouping values like this is what's going to help simplify the composition, making it more readable. In this stage, don't think about drawing. Think about painting shapes of value or shapes of color. Sometimes if you think too much about the drawing, it can freak you out and put too much pressure on yourself to make something perfect. I find working in this blob state really helps with that. Something else I noticed is how the scarf back here sort into the background. I'm hinting at that. We can play more with the hard and soft edges on the scarf more later. Now let's go back to layers, and let's bring reference blurred down a little in opacity. It's the blurred reference exposing a little bit of the rough simplified now. Now I'm going back to my painting layer. Always make sure you do that. Now here on the neck, I see this spot of light got a little too big. It looks more like an oval in shape so I paint it like that. Right around the rim where the light and shadow shapes touch you can add a little hue with some orange paint. What I'm seeing now is the hair over here so I'm going to put that in. I want to bring everything up together on this painting. I'm working on getting the forehead more accurate little by little. Thinking about the roundness of it now. Now I'm working on these lips, looking at the shape and rhythm of them. I want to also make sure I get the tip of the nose in here eventually, so I'm hinting at that. That's not quite right though. The nose is such an anchor, so I want to put it in right. I'm going to go back. Once I anchor a nose in just mentally I find, I don't want to move it. I'll wait on any specifics until I drop in some straight lines to check the placement. For now I'll just keep it about shapes of value. I want to find a nice transition color between the skin color on her forehead and the color of her hair. You got to have a middle of the road transition color right here to smoothly transition you from the skin to the hair. Otherwise, it'll look a little strange. Now I'm just working on refining some of the shapes up here. This brush does a really nice sharp edge on one side and a softer edge on the other side. That's why I turned my Canvas that way to get that sharp edge between the hair and the head scarf. Just adding a soft transition color in here between the light and darks on the scarf. This will help soften the transition. Now I'm just pushing around what I've got up here, trying to look back and forth between reference and painting to help me make adjustments to the shapes. Right now everything is in a malleable state and I'm trying to keep it that way until I get enough paint up on the Canvas. Then we'll take a closer look with some measurements. What you can do if you want to find a transition color between two colors is pick up the one color and note where it lands on the color sphere. Then pick up the other color and note where it lands in comparison. Then select a color that would land right in between those two values. This will help you find good segue colors between values where you want to soften the transition. Pop in this little bit of light on the hood of the eye now where the orbicularis muscle is. In the beginning, you start big with this approach. You put in your big shapes of value and just get it up on the canvas, you can start pushing it around. Then after that, you start thinking about placing things a bit more accurately in those transition colors. I'm still just using the six B pencil, which I find is great for getting started on a painting like this. I like using brushes with a little texture. If you're using another painting program, I would suggest not using anything too fluffy or soft. This type of brush can make you too careful when you're painting. I would use a brush that's a little bit grungy or has a bit of a harder edge. Here I'm just trying to pick up some of the slight value changes in the hair. We got to the big shapes so now we're heading into medium shapes. Again, always thinking about rhythms in the whole. Back on this face, the darker value here comes out more, so I'm working to correct that. I'm just trying to get in some of those more subtle color shifts now. Let's find a transition color between the neck and shadow here. That helps segue us a little better between the dark, dark, and the light of the skin. Let's do the same thing over on this hairline. Here's the darker value, here's the lighter value. Something in the middle would be about there. And there's our transition layer. Eventually the color picker won't be quite as helpful anymore. Because there are so many colors in this reference image, it's hard to pick up the exact colors every time. Eventually, you'll have to go off the colors that actually ended up in your painting and shift to new colors from there. So keep that in mind as you move along. I think we've got a good base here. So let's move into nailing this down a bit better with some measuring techniques. 6. Checking the Proportions Pt 1: When I'm first starting to painting, I like to float things along and place them generally. As you saw, I also like to observe and paint the negative space to help me get everything up on the Canvas. After I have that solid base and the compositions generally placed then I like to go in and take some measurements to place everything more accurately. What I'm going to do now is add a new layer because I want to do some proportional checks then I'm going to go to my brushes. Instead of the 6B, we'll use the willow charcoal streamline brush. Now I'm just going to go to my colors here and I'm just going to pick a bright color. Now I'm just adjusting the size of the brush and I'm just going to drop in some straight lines. We can see if things are lining up, so here at the base of the nose. If you hold your line and then use your other finger to tap the screen, it should snap to a perfect horizontal. Here across the eyes the top of the forehead, bottom of the chin snap it to the perfect horizontal this neckline area. Also, if you do it wrong, you can just two-finger tap on your screen to undo. Now we can see where exactly things land a bit better. We can see where things are off and need to be changed. Here I have this neckline going down a little further than it does. The chin is ambiguous so I needed to find that and make sure I have this little space in-between here, like the references. The nose is placed pretty good the eye is pretty decently placed but it could shift up a bit. Then also the forehead can actually shift up a bit too. Then we can also take a look at the top of the head. We can look at these horizontal lines and see how our paintings are comparing. Back in my layers, I'm going to be sure to click back on the painting layer so I can start making some of those corrections. Grabbing my 6B pencil, I'm first going to just push up this forehead it's more like here. The chin needs to find its way so I'm going to grab this dark color here and I'm just going to try and shape this chin up a little better. I'm looking at the new negative space that's been created by adding the horizontal line. I'm also noticing the values a bit darker here. I want to get that in while I'm thinking about it. This ends a bit further up. We also get more of this kind of segue tone. Again, make sure you're working on your painting layer. If you ever find you actually draw on the wrong layer, it's a little bit of a hassle but you can copy and paste it over to your painting layer if that ever happens. I also see this eye so I do want to make sure the side doesn't go too low. It doesn't look right so I know I have to add this lighter skin value to help push it all up so I just do it. It's got to move. Let's just move it now while we don't have any precious details in place. We're still thinking in shapes of value just slightly smaller shapes now. Just make sure everything still conforms to the overall value statement. With this eye here, I can see that this little piece right here comes down below this line. This little piece right here is going to be essential to get in that tilt of the head. I want to make sure I get that in all of this is tilted. Everything is on a slight tilt and it's easy to miss. I don't want to get too far into the weeds with these lips because I need to make sure they're placed right before adding the details. I do see a nice tone here that I want to grab onto. There's also a nice mid-tone here so I want to add that. Let me also get this darker value on the underpinning of the nose. I also want to get in this swoopy C-shape in the eye and this pops out at the light. This is going to go back into shadow. Looking at the nose color I'm going to lighten that up here a bit. I don't want to go into those highlights right yet. Even though I'm very tempted to I want to make sure everything is placed well so I can just pop those in. Now I'm darkening the chin but it pops back into light. I just want a hint at that. Now I'm making the brush a little smaller. Sometimes this brush is a little finicky. Sometimes it'll go thick when you want it to go thin but usually, it will adjust after you go back and try again. I'm seeing this as a little more peachy. I'm going to grab that color that's there and move it a little more saturated. I'm going to lower the opacity, and with a lighter touch, just do a little bit. I'm seeing as well, I have the angle of her shirt wrong. Here, it's more angled on the reference, whereas I've straightened it out. If I want to get that angle, I'll have to draw it a little better. I'll grab this black, put the opacity back up. It's a little more like that. I think I need another transition color here. We have this dark of the hair, we have this light of the skin, and there's this brown mid tone right in the middle. I guess I already did that. It might just need another one. Here we have this. We get something right in the middle. That can be our transition. This is how you can transition between values with paint. I could probably use one here too. Here we have brown, here we have the skin color. Let's get it right in the middle. This is our transition color to help soften the edge. Continuing on, let's grab a different brush now. I want to grab this willow charcoal streamline brush. This is one I use a lot and I just want to take a look at the drawing. I'm going to turn the opacity of these lines down a little bit so I can look more at the painting. I'm still in the painting layer. I want to round out the top of her head here, put a solid stop to that. I don't have this value quite right yet. I want to get this in here. The dark part goes more like this. I really like this orange color up here, so I want to get that in. It's a little more orange right there in the transition. Working on this cheek structure now. I find it a little more saturated in color here. Here, I want to get this color a little better. The ear here, I see that I did it a little low. I want to make sure I get that in the right spot. Her ear is overall higher. Just adjusting these colors and shapes. We do have to make sure this neck is getting dark enough so that the light can really sing. There's also this back of the jaw here that we want to get in, this little piece. I also notice it's a little more maybe purply down here. I like that color coming in. Down here, I see it gets pretty dark. I want to definitely make sure we capture that value because I know it's going to be important. I definitely bounce around a lot while painting. That's just my personal painting process and style. I like to work on the whole piece at the same time, bringing it all up together versus working on an eye or whatever, finishing it completely and then working to the next feature. But it's totally whatever works for you. All roads lead to Rome as they say, and your process is unique to you, and one process is not better or worse than the other. Do what feels right to you at the end of the day. Just darkening this up now. Little shape here in the hair. I see a little shadow shape in the scarf, so I put that in. Just hopping around the piece, addressing things as they pop out to me. I want to get these really simple shapes in on the head scarf. There's a little subtle bend that happens here. Instead of making this a generic little triangle, let's try to capture a little bit of that uniqueness that's happening. Now, I'm just adjusting the shape of the scarf. 7. Checking the Proportions Pt 2: I want to try another proportional check. Let's make a quick grid on this. I'm going to go to my Layers, unchecked the horizontal orange lines for now, and I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to use the willow charcoal streamline brush again. Let's put the size about here. I just want to make a border around this whole thing using that hold and tap again to get a nice straight horizontal and vertical lines. Then let's try and place a line whereabout the ear lands here. Let's also do one right about where the face is. Here we can see the forehead goes a little past the line. The nose goes a little past the line, the lip doesn't. That's the check we can make. Another one that would be good is where the eye would be. Let me go ahead and put that one in. Then why don't we just also put a horizontal line whereabout the chin lands? Basically, you can make your own little custom grid. Quick grid like this to make checks. Once you already have some stuff up on the Canvas, I find is very beneficial for checking the accuracy of your placement. I'll add another vertical line here just to bracket in whereabout that ear goes because that's a nice little landmark to really solidify. Now what I actually want to do first before we get rolling on this is bring the Reference Blurred down a little bit in opacity to start revealing more of the rough simplified, which has a bit more information on it. Also, just to note, we still have the plane reference completely turned off. Let's go ahead and slide left on that grid to duplicate it, and then take the transform tool. Then under Snapping, keep Magnetics and Snapping on. Then with uniform selected, I'm just going to drag that over. See that blue line that happened, we want to keep that blue line. Now we have two grids. I'm just going to go ahead and merge them down. Now I can make another assessment. I see here maybe this is coming out a little too much and it also slants back. The nose is coming out a pretty good amount. I need to make sure I'm not shy about it and I'm putting it all the way out. The lips are looking pretty good. Looking at the hair, I have the hair coming out a little bit further. It actually ends right here though. This is the type of thing you can look at. Obviously, you don't have to do everything perfectly, unless you're going for exactness. You can always change things if you want to. Here I can see I didn't really get this swoop happening that I wanted to capture. I don't want to generalize this. I want to capture that swoop. It looks like I got the ear going pretty good. It's in a good spot, landing right in that chamber. You can also use this grid for looking at abstract shapes. Here we have a really easy to see abstract shape. Let me grab a color and outline it. Here is this very unique shape, whereas mine is very generic. If you see shapes like this, grab onto them and paint them. They're easier to paint because they're not like anything you've ever seen before. Your brain has never seen this exact shape, so you won't paint it with preconceived ideas, like you might say an eyeball. Let me try and draw that a little better. I like to use the willow charcoal streamline brush for painting something specific like this, because it's more of a drawing brush, whereas the 6B brush feels a little bit more painterly to me. I'm just trying to make that a little more true to what it is. Always glancing back and forth between my reference and painting. Just adjusting this ear now. It also gets just a little bit warmer here. I want to hint at that color. Now I'm going to grab the 6B brush to be a little bit more painterly again. Just hinting at some of these tinier shapes of value. With the ears, I find it's best to simplify the anatomy. You really don't need all the tiny details. You just need the essential shapes that capture the light and shadow. You can also play with edges on the ears. Note how in this simplified reference, some of the edges are soft and some are harder. That'll help you paint it as well. I'm going to grab the willow charcoal brush again and just get in this transition color near the neck. I'm just pushing it a bit more yellowy-green. Sometimes transition colors with a little bit of green in them can help on skin tones. Like I was saying, I don't want this head scarf to be super general, so I want to get this swoop in here. I can fix some of this when I eventually bring in the smudge tool. Just adjusting the light on the hair. I'm really sneaking up on this eye. I want to paint all of the shapes and forms around the eye before I think about painting a pupil. If I squint my eyes down, there's more of a shape in here as well. Then I see this form of her cheek actually comes past the vertical line on my grid on the reference. I want to make sure I make that adjustment. If I'm not lying to myself, there's more space between the wing of her nostrils and that vertical line on the reference. I add some of this light value in to account for that. Sometimes that can be a little bit stubborn about moving the features when they need to be moved, but I find it's easier to correct early on than it is to correct it when it's hours into your piece. Just trying to find a slight value difference to separate the top lip and the bottom lip. For this nostril, I'm not going to draw a dark oval. Instead, I just hatch it in. Sometimes if you outline and color in a dark shape for the nostril, it can overwhelm the face and be a little too intense. Instead, I can just hatch it in. I'm going to make visible my horizontal lines again. But I'm actually going to move them down as well because I want to see where this far I should go. Going back to the painting layer, I want to see where this little spot is. It's pretty crucial to nail down. I'm going to grab that little background color and going back to my painting, let me hire the opacity here. Now back on my painting, that little spot is right here, so I put that in. This brown area comes in more like that. Looking back and forth and back and forth on my painting, I can see that the nose comes out here. I definitely don't always paint this precisely, but I want to teach you how to do it, so you can if you want to. Because you can definitely keep this more loose if you want to and have it be more painterly. That's up to you. Your approach can change from one piece to the next. When I take these guides off, it's going to look a little funky at first, but we'll figure it out. Let's go ahead and take the guides off because they're getting a little bit overwhelming and I don't want to get too caught up in tiny corrections. So let's take a look at this little swoop. This little shape here is the keystone shape. That's typically going to be a color change since it's a plane change. Sometimes a photograph isn't going to give us all the information we need. We have to put our knowledge into our paintings as well. Our knowledge of the planes, anatomy, etc. If you like portraits, I love to see you in my class drawing and painting portraits, a guide for artists. There we go much more in depth into all this sort of stuff, and I think the knowledge you can gain from that course will really help you in your portraiture. Because there we talk a lot more about anatomy, the planes, the forms, the rhythms you can find in the face just all sorts of stuff involving specifically faces. You can keep that information in the back of your brain when you're working from a reference so that this doesn't just become copying a reference. You can infuse your knowledge of the human head into it as well. Here the bones and the muscles here sort. So you'll know, maybe I should try curving my strokes here to enhance the idea of that. These are the things that you can paint a little bit better if you just have that basic knowledge of anatomy. You don't have to be an anatomist, you just need a basic knowledge of some of the important landmarks and we go over them in that class. So this brow hops into light, so I want to make sure it doesn't get too dark. I'm going to make this transition color a little more saturated. We want to get this forehead turning. You can see how when I paint my strokes, I'm thinking about that turn and I'm doing these little hatched lines in the direction of that turn. I want to take a look at the shape of the shadow on the side plane overhead. So I'll add a new layer and grab this blue color here. So outlining, I see this shadow shape and I really want to get it right. The shape keeps popping out at me as a shape I want to get right. What you can do is even duplicate that and drag it over. Let's see if we even have it in the ballpark. So I think what I'm seeing is this probably needs to cut back a little in the scenes to come forward and up a little. So let me grab onto this color, turn off this layer and make sure you're painting on the painting layer. I just want to try and get that a bit more accurately. Around this band it all connects and then we can pick up this color and push it up. Then it sweeps up into here. I find this color on this masseter muscles got a bit more green in that. So when I see a color as having a bit more of a color in it, I'll actually go to my color wheel, and in this case I'll just grab a saturated green, make my brush really small and because I see this patch right here as having a little bit of green in it, I'll just go ahead and tap that in really, really lightly. Just hinting at that with this bright green, leaving some space in-between to let the previous color show through. It makes for a nice color variation. The plains of this cheekbone go like this. Again, I'm trying to paint my strokes that way. So your stroke direction can help you communicate a plane change or the way a form flows. Here, I'm just trying to put it in another segue color. Back in layers, I'm going to delete these now. Let's take a look at the chin now. I want to try and get that a little bit better. This piece, got a little light, so I'm want to color that in. There's this little color change on the forehead I want to get in. It goes a little cooler I think. I select the color and make it a little bit cooler by pushing it less saturated towards gray. It's a subtle color change, but it helps turn the form. Again, you really want to make sure you have transition colors between the forehead and the hair. Now I want to get her forehead more specific to her. She has this point right here where it all meets. So it goes this way, meets at this point and then tucks back. I want to get that particular part of her instead of generalizing it. I'm going to take this color here and get that little point and then it floats back. You can think about how this relates on the other side too, since the face is bilaterally symmetrical. But all of this is the front plane of her forehead. Then all of this starts to go back. So this is where some of your knowledge of the planes would come in. So you're not just copying, but you're putting your knowledge into it as well and getting in these plain change, color changes will start to make her look more three-dimensional instead of flat. 8. Painting the Nose: Now I want to hone in on a couple of these features. So with this reference image, the pictures that are showing through are reference blurred, which I have at 48 percent, and ref simplified, which I have at 100 percent. It's basically these two images mixed; reference blurred and ref simplified. Without getting too confusing here, let's go ahead and duplicate reference blurred and let's duplicate ref simplified. Go ahead and drag the ref simplified right under the new reference blurred. Basically now we just have two copies of these two images. Now select Reference Blurred and merge down. Let's rename it nose. Because I want to take this and just take a look at the nose. Now take your Selection tool and grab the rectangle, and select the Nose. Press "Invert" at the bottom, then slide down with three fingers and press "Cut". Now we have a close-up of this nose using the two references. Now take the Transform tool and just slide that on over. Then go to layers and bring the nose layer up above the painting layer so we can actually see it. Now we have these two side-by-side, which will make looking back and forth easier. Actually, let's move it this way just to hair. Make sure that the blue horizontal line stays here though. So you know it's right in line. Now back in layers, let's add a new layer on top and start assessing this nose. I noticed color on this front plane of the nose. Then this shape is all pretty similar color. I'm just grouping that together. Then up here, I see this plane of the nose. I'm just trying to look at both shapes of value and planes to break this down a bit. Here's about where the keystone shape is. Here we have this plane change as we move back into the eye socket. I want to get these shapes better online. I'm going to go back to my painting layer, and I'm going to try and paint this better. I'm going to look at this shape first and try and paint it more accurately. I noticed this all being a similar value. For now, I'm just going to group it together, and later we can put our knowledge of the planes and anatomy onto it. Now I'm just working out this area in the light, trying to get more accurate colors as I go. Right now it looks patchy and all over the place. Let's bring back some structure to this. I think what will help me is establishing where the front plane of the nose is and where the side plane of the nose is. This is one way you could stroke across the form. You could also stroke this way. Sometimes it's better to stroke along the width of the form, rather than the length of it. An experiment. Now I'm moving the nostril a little bit. I'm just breaking this nose down into more simplified shapes and planes. It's not like this is exactly what you'd see on a plane's head. I'm picking and choosing from my knowledge of the planes, using only what I think will be beneficial for pushing this portrait forward. As a note, I will say this is quite a bit more careful than I would typically paint. It's a bit slower, but I'm trying to have you paint along with me. If I were to just slap everything one up on the Canvas by instinct, then I don t think you'd learn quite as much because it would be harder for you to catch what's happening, and the reasons behind what I'm doing. I know this class is quite long, but hopefully it gives you a good look into what I'm doing, but also why I'm doing it. Here, I just see this portion above the nostril as a little bit lighter in value. It's the tiniest shift lighter in value. If you ever want to blow this up, you go like that. Just the tiniest value shift up. Because we don't want anything in the shadow to pop out as too lightened value, as it has to belong to the shadow still. Let's take a look at these shapes now. What I like about this eyebrow is it just goes right into the background. These are the things you can look for with edges. Lightning that value a little. Back to this nose bridge, I see this gets a little redder here. I'm not going to color pick, I'm just going to find a color that's a little more red and put that in. Like I mentioned, the nose in general will go more red. You can stroke along the whole nose lightly with a red tone. Let's take a look at her philtrum area now, the space between her nose and mouth. In the reference, the values are really easily broken down into shapes. Let's try and paint those better. I'm going to take this breakdown of the nose away now. There's obviously still lots to do on the nose, but I think this is a good base for us to build off of. I'll go ahead and turn off the close-up of the nose for now. 9. Painting the Neck: Let's work on the neck for a bit now. I want to sharpen this edge. A way you can get a nice sharp edge besides drawing it is by actually using the selection tool. I'm going to grab the selection tool and I'm going to freehand it. I'll select that area of light, grab my paintbrush, make it a little bigger, and then put it really uptight to the edge of the selection here. Using a selection tool like this will give you about a sharp of an edge as you can get. What you can also do around the spot that's getting a lot of glowy light like that is you see this beautiful little orange line that's going along it, I love that sort. I'm going to grab that color just as a jumping-off point and then push it more orangey. Then I'm going to take and make my brush really small and just put that bright orange line along the edge there. That's going to make that spot below. What you can also do from there is take that color's complement. Pop over here to blue. Put that alongside the orange, and that's really going to make it glow. These are just little things you can do to make your piece just a bit more exciting visually. Typically in my process, I'd probably have gone in with the smudge tool by now but I want to have everything really solidly placed before I go smudging. I think that will actually help us in the long run. Getting in some of these dark values in the shirt. We don't want to just make it a black blob. At this point, you want to think about the fact that this is her shoulder and there are little nuanced pieces here with the lightened shadow. At this point, we're heading out of the blob stage and looking a bit more at the uniqueness of this reference. That said, however, you don't want to get so caught up in the weeds that you forget the big picture. We're going back and forth between focusing on specifics and then backing up to see the big picture and we're continuing that flow back and forth through this middle phase of the piece. I want to spend a little more time drawing now. I'm going to continue with this willow charcoal streamline brush. I like where the painting is right now, so I'm just going to go ahead and duplicate my painting layer and we're going to duplicate. That way if I ever want to go back to my previous version that I liked, I'll have it. Right now I'm just making this sleeve a little more accurate. Now I'm just darkening up the value of the background here. I'm actually going to switch back to the 6B brush as I work on the background. I see this part in the light as being a bit larger. I'm going to grab my selection tool and see if I can just make it a bit bigger using the free-hand selection. I'm going to make it a little bit larger and tilt it a little. I'm just going to make that hot orange line a bit thicker. Now I'm going to grab this willow charcoal large brush. I like this one because there's no size variation. It's just this one thick paintbrush and it helps me not get too far into the details. This is sometimes a nice brush alternative for starting a painting, but I'll use it right here as well to add some color variation on this neck. This 6B is just my trusty go-to though so I use this one more. This is a little part of the anatomy that we'll want to get in to show some information of this neck. This is the part of the sternocleidomastoid muscle that attaches to the sternum. Want this to go a little bit oranger here. Just adding a little bit of a bluish hint to the dark shirt. I want to hint at this muscle on the neck, but I don't want it to pop out so light in value that it becomes distracting. It's a delicate balance. Switching back to my willow charcoal streamline brush now. Now I'm just working on some of the color shifts in this cheek area. I'm looking at the negative space of the black shirt to try and place this neckline a little better. Back with the 6B here, just continuing to tweak, always looking back and forth and back and forth. Now I'm just working on shapes of color in this hair. Notice we're not painting the hairs here. We're just painting shapes of value. That's really what painting good hair is all about I think, capturing the way the light hits it and the value patterns that result from that. Here on the neck, I'm just getting a little segue transition color here. Here, I'm just adding a couple more shapes of value on the head scarf. I like where this is heading, so I'll tap the layer and merge it down. 10. Painting the Lips: I want to continue to get more and more specific on this piece. I'm going to go to my reference blurred layer and bring the opacity of that down. Now ref simplified will show through even more. It's still a very simplified version of the reference, but it offers us a bit more than before. I'll duplicate my painting layer again and work on a duplicate. I want to check in on the proportions again, so I'm turning on my grid layers to check that out. I'm zooming in here. I want to make sure I get these lips right. Why don't we just go ahead and turn reference blurred off for now. Go to ref simplified and grab the selection tool. We're going to go to rectangle, and we're going to select the mouth. Then swipe down with three fingers and press "Copy". Swipe down with three fingers again and press "Paste". I'm going to take the lips layer and drag it on over, but make sure you have snapping on and magnetics because then it'll drag it straight across for you. You can tell it is because of that blue line that shows up. Then I'm just going to drag the layer all the way up here above the painting. Now we can get a closer look at these lips. I can see already how I've generalized quite a bit. Let's continue to use this 6B brush. Then I want to start thinking about the shapes that fall below this line and the shapes that go above the line. I'm thinking about shape along with value. What I think might also help me in painting these lips is to turn my canvas upside down, so let's flip it. That'll help me think less about lips and think more about abstract shapes. I can already see things my brain wasn't catching before, so this little skin color that comes into here. Our brains have programmed how it thinks things should look. Something like an eye, a tree, or in this case, lips, our brains have preconceived ideas for what these things look like. Flipping your canvas can help make it so that it's no longer lips, but now a series of abstract shapes that your brain has never seen before, which will help you paint it more accurately. Flipping your canvas is a nice way to trick your brain into drawing what's actually there. You're drawing what you see versus what you think you see. I'm just getting in some color shifts on these lips, keeping in mind the grand value statement that I need to capture, which is, her top lip is darker and the bottom lip on her is lighter in value. Of course, flip-flopped in this upside-down view. What's going to make these red lips appear even richer in color is surrounding it with a little bit of green. Or even go ahead and pick up the lip color and grab the complement across the wheel. That's going to make it appear even more saturated. Now I'm just going to grab the willow charcoal streamline brush and just round out this top lip, which got a bit pointy. Just working on a couple of color shifts around the lips now. 11. Painting the Eyes: Let's go ahead and do the same thing for the eye now. Select Ref Simplified, then grab the Selections tool, rectangle, and I'm going to grab this eye for now. Three-finger swipe down, copy, three-finger swipe down, paste. Then I just drag it on over and bring it above my painting layer. Then I'll tap my painting layer , and let's look at this now. I'm going to grab my 6B large brush and first, I just want to draw out some stuff. Starting with the brow, I'm just trying to place that better and map out where that brow might go. Then all this connects and flows rhythmically into the eye. It's sketching this out, trying to find rhythmical connections between the different structures. Now let me bounce back and think about some shapes of value. She has this very full-looking form under her brow, so we want to show the convexity of that. I'm thinking about the 3D quality of that brow bone and how it turns. Here let's pick up this dark color. See how sometimes this 6B brush will do some weird stuff, but usually, if you undo and try again, it'll work. Now I'm just trying to establish how light is hitting this eye with shapes of value. As you can see, I'm not even thinking about the iris or pupil yet. Now I'm looking at the way the color shifts on this brow. Here we have a warm brown, then we get a cool gray. I'm going to stroke some cool green across it, and then it heads back to this darker color. Just stroke it in a warm, rusty color here. If you keep the values the same and just shift the hue of the color and put that on top, you can get some really scintillating color effects which are fun to play around with. Now here, I'm not thinking about making an oval-shaped iris, I'm literally sketching in a little colored place marker to represent where the colored part of the eye might end up. Just stroke in some color across here now to make it a little more exciting. I think something more orangey would be nice. Then in here, the sclera catches some light, so I'm lightening it up just a bit with a gray color. Down here I see this lower lash line as being a bit warmer in color, so I stroke that in. Now I'm going to go ahead and flip my canvas again to change up my perspective. I can see that we get into a real shadow zone right here. I'm putting my pencil on its side and quickly putting in that shading, trying to connect it all. I'm just bringing this part in the light up a bit more. The pencil is getting a little weird, but a couple of tries does the trick. Just adding this triangular-looking shape in here and I'm just hatching in where some of the darkest values land. Trying to get the shape and the light in this transition color here. Now we have a pretty good base setup for that eye. Here I'm picking up an average color for this area to try and harmonize everything together again so nothing gets too spotty in value. I went a little too far there, but I think this is good. Now I'm going to grab the smudge tool and with the soft pastel brush, I'm just going to soften up that inner corner of the eye. This soft pastel brush is a modified default brush from Procreate, and it's one of my favorites for blending. We'll return to the Smudge tool later. Now I'm just using some hatch lines to darken some values around this far eye. I really like this sparkly lighter value here on the edge of her nose, so I'm going to put that in and I'm going to darken around that edge with this darker teal color to make that pop a bit more. Here, I'm trying to find a little bit of a value difference in that front plane of the nose. I'll just turn that nose layer off for now. Now I want to finally pop in some of these bright highlights, and instead of making them white, I want to add a little color tint to them. On this forehead, I'm shifting the hue towards this pinky purple, and on the cheek, I use a bluish tint. On the chin, I push it a little more minty green. I find that this color variation makes for a more exciting piece. Now I'm going to grab this 6B pencil Procreate for large brush and I just want to define the chin a little more. I'm using the values surrounding the chin to cut in and define it a bit better. Now I'm putting into this darker value to better show the bottom plane of the jaw. Sometimes if I want to place the sclera or "the whites of the eyes," I'll actually color-pick the skin tone in the light and then just pull that right up to where the sclera is. I find this as an easy way to place it without much fuss. Now I'm flipping my canvas and I want to hint at the lashes on this side, so I'm putting that dark value in. Now here, similar to the forehead-to-hairline transition, I find it's good to have a transition value between eyebrows and skin, so I'm using my 6B large with flat edge brush for that. I want to get this light story on her hair. Let me grab my willow charcoal streamline brush and add a new layer and let me outline real quick. I want to make sure I get this separation between the light and shadow sides. Back on my painting layer, I'm going to try and make that more specific, and I'm still looking at the breakdown of values as if they're abstract shapes. Then back on the jaw now, I'm just going to add a bit more warmth to this color. 12. Perspective, Planes, and Rhythms : Normally when I paint, I'll just paint my picture based on citing, and I'll make sure the angles on the front plane of the face track together. I'll make sure their pupils track. The top of the brow, to the top of the brow, the front plane of the forehead, the bottom plane of the nose, and so on and so forth. But this reference makes it a bit more challenging for us because we're also dealing with a tilt. We want to make sure these front planes appear to converge to a vanishing point. We want to convey that the head is receding in space. Now I don't want you to get so caught up in perspective that you lose sight of the artistry of your painting. But I want to make you aware of the effects of perspective. Because if we imagine where these imaginary lines go, they'll actually meet up at a distant vanishing point. In this reference, the eye level, which is the horizon, lands at about the chin I think. We want to feel that perspective of her head and that these lines converge to a distant vanishing point. There's a tool in Procreate that can help us with that. Here in layers, I'm going to turn these lines off and let me go ahead and take the reference, duplicate it, bring it all the way to the top so we can look at the actual image. I'm going to add a new layer and let's put in some points that we know are symmetrical on both sides. Here are the pupils. I'll put a line in these both go to the vanishing point. We could do the same thing with the eyebrows here. Where it gets tricky is in here where we can't see the other side. So we'll have to make our best guess. Here if the corner of her lip is here, I would imagine the other corner of her lip would land about here. I'm imagining through things. Here it's a sharper angle, but then as you start to come down, it starts to even out. Whereabout here, it starts to go horizontal. Around here is where eye level will be. But at the end of the day, this is a human. She's not a block or a robot. All of this is just to make sure we get the illusion of the head receding in space. Basically, we just don't want to end up with the perspective all wonky like this so that's what we're trying to prevent. In Procreate, let's head to actions. Tap Drawing Guide on, and then tap Edit Drawing Guide. Tap down here where it says perspective and go ahead and bring the opacity and thickness all the way up. Then you can pick a color up here along the top. Then just tap a point out here somewhere and then you can move this around. What I'm trying to look for is one of these lines to line up with these pupils because that's one of the lines we know. Then I want the other lines to line up with the other markers we put on here. This is lining up. If there was a line here that would probably line up. This seems similar to what I drew. Then around here is whereabout that horizontal line is. This gives us a pretty good idea of the perspective of her face. I'm going to press down on that and delete mine that I did. Then I put a new layer on top and then also press the layer and tap Drawing Assist. There we go. There's those pupils lining up. Then here at the bottom of the brows. Brow, brow, pupil, pupil. Then here's the bottom of the nose. Then if that's correct, then over here would be the bottom of the nose. Then it starts evening out to where here on this line, there's that side of the mouth. Imagine it to the other side, it's about there. Again, please don't get lost in all this because it's easy to do. It's easy to start thinking about boxes and perspective and lose sight of the creative aspect of portrait making. I don't want you to get so caught up in perspective that you aren't having fun with us anymore. If you're anything like me, this isn't the most natural part of portrait making, so just keep these ideas in the back of your head. Even up here, there's some variation on the lines versus what we're actually seeing so don't sweat the perspective too much. Just use this as a tool to see that all the angles on the front plane of the face converge to a distant vanishing point. Normally perspective won't be this dramatic looking in a standard portrait, but because she's tilting her head, we're seeing it more. Now let's turn the drawing guide off, because we're going to use these perspective marks to see how we're doing. In layers, I'll swipe left to plus duplicate and I'll drag that straight over. I'm just lining up to worry about the pupils would be on my portrait. I see I could be doing better. Things could be tweaked a bit to better show that perspective. I see the eyebrows could be placed better to better convey that tilt. At the forehead, it's not as dramatic as the line shows, but it is more dramatic than I painted it so I could do that better. Let me turn these off for now and I'm going to delete this reference. I'll also delete this layer as well and I'll head back to my painting layer. At this point we've made some changes on the painting so let's go ahead and duplicate it again. I like to duplicate because I like to see my changes as they come and I also like to hold on to different stages of the process. Now actually I'll go ahead and turn back on the perspective on the reference side. Here I can see I have to push this side of the front plane of the forehead up a little bit. Then this eyebrow over here can go up. I can sit here and think about how it needs to move or I can just go ahead and move it. Then this eyebrow on the far side can go down a bit, and that'll better show that tilt of the angle of the brow line. We can add more light here to start to push this eye up. I feel like I could adjust the angle at which the base of the nose is placed, so I'm doing that. The lips start to even out a bit more than I have them. Something else that will help us with these lips is getting in that edge of the face that shows up on the far side. See this little teeny, teeny edge that shows up right here. Getting that on there will help us turn this head. Here I'm just defining that chin a little bit better. Now let's take a look at the structure. I'll turn this perspective layer off, add a new layer on top, and grab a blue color. Going back to layers, let's go ahead and turn the reference layer on. I'm just going to slide this opacity slider down a bit so we can get a good mix of information and simplification here. Then on this perspective layer, I'm going to actually turn it back on and just lower the opacity down a bit to make it lighter. Then let's grab this new layer we made and drag it on top. Select it, and then I want to look at some of the planes. Let's start with the tip of the nose. Subtle value changes will give us hints to where the plane changes happen. You can also look at the Andrew Loomis planes head or the SRO head to guide you. Keeping in mind that perspective, I would imagine about here is the front plane. Then this goes back for another plane change. If I turn perspective off, here's another plane change for the front plane on the bridge of the nose. Then if I go brow to brow, this is that keystone shape here. This would be the plane of the nose that starts to turn inward towards the face. Here's the base of the nose. Right about here we can make that break, between the plane that faces upwards and the plane that starts to face downwards. Now I'm considering the plane changes on the forehead. I'm using the values that we see here to help break that down. Something else we might want to think about is how this curves around here and then enter this. This is a little bit of rhythm. With rhythms, we're trying to find flowing connections within the head and face. Here you can go through the back of the head to the underside of the jaw. Looking at these lips now, here we have her philtrum area. Then with these lips, this one goes in and this one stair steps out. Under the mouth here the plane faces downward, and then this part of the chin comes back out into light. It's the sort effect. This is how I think about heads. I'll grab from my knowledge of planes, forums, rhythms, whatever, and try and see it on the particular head I'm painting. It's not like we have to use the planes head like it's a cookie cutter. Just use these conceptualizations when they're helpful with the piece you're painting. What we can do is bring this over here and see how we're doing. I can get the stair-step happen on the chin better. I could paint her forehead a bit better and the planes on the nose better. These are just some checks you can do for yourself to see how you can improve your piece. 13. Working on the Lips, Hair, and Scarf: I really got to start getting these lips right. Let me delete all of these for now, because it's getting a little busy in here. In the images I have on right now are reference and ref simplified. I want to duplicate ref simplified, and I'm going to duplicate reference, and then I'll bring the ref simplified up here, and I'll put reference on top of that, and then I'll merge it down so it's altogether. Then I'll grab the selections tool with the rectangle and I'll select the lips. I swipe down with three fingers, copy, swipe down with three fingers, paste. Then let me just slide that on over and drag it up over the painting so we can see it. Then I select my painting layer and zoom in on those lips. I think what I'll do is go ahead and flip it, and flip it horizontally too. I'm going to go ahead and give myself a couple of lines on a new layer, and that'll help me as well. Now back on my painting. Actually, let me go ahead and add one more line. Now back on my painting, I'm going to see where I've gone off. It's not terribly off. Let me also just real quick turn those off and I'm going to put my grids back on, because I'm not even sure I have this mouth place correctly. If I zoom in here, I can see that next to this upper lip, there's that little teeny bit of skin showing through from the other side, and I don't have that on mine. I want to make sure I get that in because otherwise the lips are going to look too far out. I also see the corner ends up here. Again, let's turn it upside down. Let's take a look at this. Adding a new layer, I'm going to grab the blue, and see how the shape on her top lip looks like this. We have that flow happening. Whereas here on mine it's like that. It's not nearly as specific as it could be. We have to get that down a little bit better. I think that'll help me push these lips forward. Let's paint it. Make sure you're on your painting layer. Now I'm seeing a little bit of this shape here on the bottom lip gets a darker value. There's also this cast shadow under here. Then this light value is up a little higher than I have it. I'll use the soft pastel smudge tool to smooth that back out. Just redefining that edge a little bit better now. I'm just working on small shapes of value now. Here above this lip, there's a little bit of a darker tone on the skin that I want to get done. I'm just bouncing around to different values as I see them, that I need to add in. Here on this chin, I'm going to start getting in this highlight portion. Make sure the skin tone is rich enough in color so that the highlights you pop in will actually show up and sync. Let me turn these grids off for now and turn on that other grid layer so we can see how we're doing. Just bouncing around some more and tweaking. Flipping it right-side-up again, I'm just going to delete the grid layer since I think it's looking better. Now I'm going to work on this far eye of it. Here's a little value shift to indicate that top lid. Here I'm selecting this color to pull out the lashes a bit more. Then I'm hinting up this crease of the top lid. Now here on this jaw, I'm just trying to get these colors in the light a bit better. I'm going to grab my 6B large brush, and right now I'm feeling a little bit okay, how can I really start pushing this piece forward? Sometimes when you've been doing something for a long time, you have to switch it up. I've been using a lot of grids and trying to be exact, but sometimes you got to flip that up and go back to instinctual painting. That's what we're going to do. No grids, no lines. We're just going to paint as we see it. Here, I'm just grabbing onto this highlight, put it in. I see I want to push the scarf forward, so I'm going to go ahead and start working on that. I don't want to leave any one part of this piece abandoned for too long. I do want to bring in some of these details in the pattern. I'm going to grab my willow charcoal streamline brush, and start drawing those in. Here we have a couple of wrinkles I think it would be nice to get in to show the folds a little bit better. Down here now I'm just fixing the drawing a little bit. I think her shoulder comes down some. In here this is darker so I'm just correcting that. Now let's start working on this hair. We have the big shapes in so let's go a tear down and work on the medium shapes now. How to draw hair is a really common question I get and here's my tip, it's really good. Don't draw hair, draw shapes of value. Here I see like an H shape maybe so we're going to paint that H shape that's lighter in value than the surrounding values. Here I see a darker V-shape so I'll paint that in. Almost think of it like a paint by numbers at first. Just don't start small with individual hairs start big with shapes of value. I'll say this for any type of hairstyle and texture, shapes of value are the key. Then add flyaway hairs or texture on top once that solid structure is established. Now I'm working on that head scarf again and here's this beautiful little section here on the scarf that I really love and I don't want to mess that up. I'm going to grab my smudge tool here with the soft pastel and smudge these two values into each other. Then these values collide in here from the top to the underside so I'm just joining those up. Then I think this is a bit warmer than I have it so I'm just going to push that a bit more warm. Right here it gets lighter in value so I'm just making that adjustment. I can also take a darker value here and define that edge a bit more. Here it's a fun place to play around with color temperature shifts so I'm experimenting with that. There's also a little dip that happens in here that I want to get done. Now, I'll just smudge that a little bit to soften it up, pressing lightly. We'll get more into the specifics of how I like to use the smudge tool coming up in the next video. What also happens is in here, it gets quite dark and the edge gets a bit sharper. Then here I want to get on this transition color to help me turn this from light into shadow. This area up here goes a bit cooler. You can use color temperature shifts to help you turn the form as well. This pops out a little lighter to me so I'm just going to push that a little bit lighter in value. I'll just blend it in with the soft pastel brush and the smudge tool. Here I see this triangular shape so I want to paint that better. Here I'll just soften up some of these edges with the soft pastel smudge tool. Just shapes of value, shapes of color, however you want to say it. Just smaller and smaller shapes as we begin to define more and more. Here I'll just darken up a couple of these polka dots and I'll get these small shapes and value here. Now again, just using that smudge tool to smooth these lines out. Let's get into this jaw line. Looking here I got to get this dark space here. I don't have it at all right now so I need to get that in. It gets pretty dark back here in the neck so let's put that in. In the ear here we'll pop out and catch some light and I want to get these dark shadow shapes in as well. These are quick little accents. Back on the jaw I wanted to find that with a darker value. Here on the neck we get a darker value as it turns into the shadow. Just want to make the color a little redder and run that lightly along here. The neck needs to be a little bit darker so this jaw doesn't look outlined so I'm just stroking that color in. Then here on this ear, this little part will pop in the light. Make this a little darker. I'm thinking it's finally time. Let's break out that smudge tool. 14. Using the Smudge Tool: Heading to layers, I'm going to go ahead and merge this down and duplicate the painting layer. I'm going to select the smudge tool and the soft pastel brush and we're going to start blending some of these values together and smoothing out the transitions between values where they need to be. First, I'm just going to soften up the transitions between these planes on her forehead by stroking lightly across the planes. The planes really help you nicely establish the value changes. But at the end of the day, this is a smooth surface. I'm just pressing really lightly here, moving the values lightly into each other. Going back and forth, stroking along the edges where the values touch. Here I'm lightly dragging the color from the skin into the value in the hair to soften that transition as if it's hairs flowing back. Usually I'm stroking across. I'd like to wiggle the brush back and forth between the two values versus up and down along the length of it if that makes sense. Experiment with this though. You can bring a lot of style into your piece based on the way you use this tool. Just pushing and pulling around. Here, I'm softening this area here around the neck and not everything will soften up. But in my style, I like to soften the edges a lot so that the sharp areas can sing with contrast. I'm using a medium-sized brush right now. But experiment with this based on exactly what you're smudging. Working around her shirt now. You can also do some effects like this, where you pull color into another with one big stroke. You can also ever so slightly go over the whole face with a big brush. This can work to unify the colors again. Just softening up the neck a bit and just softening up this forehead a bit now. I'm just softening up some of the transitions in the chin. I'm going to grab my willow charcoal brush now and heading to my layers. Let's see how this looks real quick. Looks cool. But I'm seeing some structural things that I need to fix. This here, I really need to get that turn from the side of the jaw to under it. Then also I over-smudged this area, so I need to get some of that back in. That connection and turn that happens right there between the eye and the brow. There's also a bit of a darker value that happens here, so I want to make sure I get that in. I also want to get that graceful quality to her neck. I want to make sure I don't get it too thick. If I consider anatomy, we would see a little bit of this pull of the muscle here. I want to hint at that muscle stretching to bring her head up. Looking at this ear now, with ears, I find less is more. Even just a basic knowledge of anatomy will go a long way. Here's a couple of quick tips for ears if you'd like some from my class, drawing and painting portraits, a guide for artists. Here I'm just trying to get these shapes in a little better. Here this value darkens a bit so I'm just going to put that a bit darker. Then I'll just use the Smudge tool to blend it. Up here on the eyes, I just want to start getting in that eyelid. Push that up a bit. Now I'm starting to push some of these features forward so I think it's time to put in a darker nostril, but not too dark so that it looks flared. I'm just adjusting the color. You don't need to make a nostril as dark as the photo shows. I want to get this little triangle in here. Now using this XB brush, I'm going to get in some of these highlights. I want to add a little bit more color in the [inaudible] I'm going to push this a little more blue. Stroking in two hues with the same value on top of each other will make your colors really exciting to look at. Here, I'm just putting in that sclera color. But you always have to remember to back up and look at your piece from a distance. It's a little too much for now, so I'll come back to them. Now, I'm using the Smudge tool to soften up these edges. Sometimes I can hang out in the stage for too long and what can help sometimes to push me forward is to add a dark accent. I'm going to be a little more brave here and add this darker value around the wing of her nostril. There's a time and place for the fuzzy blob stage, but now it's time to push this piece forward. I like this little tone in here. Just soften the edge. A lot of times on lips red along the edge it'll catch a little light there so I'll make that a lighter value. You don't want it to look outlined though. I'm just going to use the smudge tool to soften it all up. Let's do a quick assessment of these layers to get rid of the ones I no longer need. I'm going to merge these perspective guides to consolidate and then I'll delete my nose breakdown, I'm just going to group up a couple of these references to consolidate a bit. I'm going to go ahead and group these two painting layers up too. I don't like too much visual clutter. Now I'm feeling a little bit better. I want to work on these lips. I'm going to duplicate my painting and get rolling on them. I'm going to flip it upside down to change on my perspective. I'm grabbing my willow charcoal brush and I want to capture that stair-step look on the lips. I want to get this going out. I also see that this shadow shape extends a lot longer than I have it. I'm just going to grab that color and pull out further in. Then it gets a greeny tone in here which I like. Her mouth is open in the reference but I'm not going to draw in those teeth details. I'm going to use my artistic license and leave them out. This area has gotten a little dusty urine color on my painting, whereas the reference color is a bit more lively. Let's pick up some orange maybe and tap some of that in there. I'm going to make this highlight a bit more blue. Here I'm adding in some green because I want to have some fun with these colors. I don't want these lips to get two outlining so I'm trying to stay on top of that. Then let's grab this hotter pink color and pull that along the edge here. Grabbing the Smudge tool now I'm just going to blend that out a bit. I'm just blending a bit more with the Smudge tool. I really love this soft pastel brush with the Smudge tool. Let's take the lips away. I'm going to make my soft pastel brush a bit bigger so I can blend across some of these larger areas. It's really a great brush for unifying areas again if the values get too contrasty. 15. Sharpening Edges: Let's go ahead and add a new layer because I want to tighten up a couple of areas now that we've smooth things out. Let's take a look. I'm thinking this area on her scarf. I think that would be nice to lead us in. I really like this tight edge right here on her forehead. I want a crisp that one up. Then I also really liked this edge right here. What this will actually do, is create a nice little triangle for our eyes to keep bouncing around. We have a nice sharp edge here, floating around, finding the next one sharp edge,finding the next one sharp edge. It'll continuously draw us into the focal point, which is the eye. Let me go ahead and delete that for now and get to work on tightening up these edges. I'm going to grab the six p brush. If you're using this brush, you can put it on its side so that you get that tight edge on one side and then it will fade off on the other. Or you can zoom in and use a thin line to sharpen it up. There's one area sharpened, and over here on the neck, I'm going to flip it because this six p brush works better in this direction with the sharp side. Since I'm right-handed, I'm going to go ahead and flip it. I'll grab this dark black color and darken this up. The contrast and values between the dark of the shirt and the light of the skin will give us that sharper edge. Then like we did earlier, we can take that bright orange color and add that saturated color in-between. You can even take something like a dark blue and put that right up against the orange and make it even more scintillating. Then down here, it can fade out a little and get softer. I'm seeing though as I painted that, it got too general. I don't want to lose that curve of the neck. What I can do is go to my layers, turn "Alpha lock" off on my painting, and then go to "Adjustments", "liquify. " Using the Push Tool, pull that neck back out. One of the benefits of digital painting. Then the final edge I want to sharpen up to complete the corners of that triangle is the edge right here on the forehead. I go in here and add this darker value to tighten up the edge. I'm not just outlining, I'm sure to pull that tone into the background so that it's not just an outline. I bring it all the way out into the background and then I use the smudge tool to soften it. Another way you can sharpen once you've probably seen before, is you can use the free hand selection. Some artists like to sharpen like this and it has a really nice look to it. I think edges are fun to play around with and could add a lot to your piece. I like how each of these tighter edges trails back in the softness. This one here trails back into being soft, Here this one trails back into being soft, here trails back into being soft. So play around with edges and see how they can keep your viewers eye flowing through the piece. 16. Working on the Neck: I like how this is looking so I'm going to merge that down and duplicate it again. I want to work on the neck now. First, assessing the values, I see it needs to get lighter here. But it doesn't need to go out more. So I'm going to put my graph back on. And I see this dark black shape is more narrow, while on my painting, I painted it a bit wider. I want to correct the placement of the neck, so I'm pulling it out more with the skin color. And then here, I want to make sure we don't lose the light and shadow shapes here. Then the soft pastel smudge brush will come behind and save the day. Now in here, there's more of an orangey warm brown tone, so I want to get that color transition. I'm going to turn these grids back off for now, and I think that does a better job of describing the neck. There's almost a teardrop shape of light here, so I'll push that area a little darker. An important muscle to now in the neck is the sternocleidomastoid. Here we can see where it attaches to the sternum. It goes here from the mastoid process behind her ear, all the way to her sternum. It also attaches to the clavicles, but we can't see that attachment in this reference. But we want to make sure we get n where the sternocleidomastoid pops into light, where it attaches at the sternum here. That said, I'll grab this color here and darken it a tad. Then I want to draw some hatched lines here to indicate this muscle, flowing from behind her ear into the more cylindrical attachment at the sternum. So this value will be lighter to make it pop into light. Then this shape here is her clavicle bone. In here, this darker value is the pit of the neck or the jugular notch of her sternum. But I don't want this to look spotty, so I smooth out the edges with the smudge brush. Looking at shapes alone, it almost looks like an L-shape here. So if the anatomy is ever confusing, start by looking at shapes of value, then think about the forums, and then put the knowledge of anatomy on top of that. Make sure with little details like this though, you always keep in mind the whole. You don't want a little detail like this to catch your viewers' eyes so much so that it takes away from the more important parts of the piece, like the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the scarf, etc. So it's a balance between providing enough information but not enough to distract or take away from something more important. If ever something sticks out too much, I grab a big soft pastel smudge brush and lightly blend. This can help put things back in their proper rank. What I need to keep in mind is, all this anatomy on top needs to conform to the cylinder of the neck. So don't ever lose sight of the bigger things. The bigger things being the larger value statement, and the larger forms. I'm going to grab the soft brush. I see the whole thing as being more orangey, so I'm just going to lightly paint that on top here. I'm going to grab my willow charcoal brush now, and I'm going to turn off this rough simplified for now and turn off the reference to reveal a bit more of the details. So I see now that she has on a colored shirt, so I'm going to show that value distinction a bit more. Darken up in there. This is the cast shadow from the color. I'm going to try out that chord-like portion of the sternocleidomastoid muscle again. Sometimes painting is a back-and-forth. You might paint it and blur it out and repaint it again. Sometimes you have to paint things a few times before they're right. And then grabbing the soft pastel smudge tool, I'm going to stroke across it to blend. Trying to get in that darker pit of the neck again. Sometimes the first go around is just the setup for when you paint it again a second go around. Tightening up that edge on the hair a little bit. Just remembering to think and draw around the form here. Let me try out this sand smudge brush, this one can do some cool effects. Now I'm blending a little more with the soft pastel. Now I'm just painting a bit more of that color. I'm just hinting at them, not going to give them more attention than they need. Adding a little line here, I'm using a basic knowledge of colors to turn that a little bit more. Back with the soft brush, it's just a little darker and warmer in there. I usually use a really light touch with this brush. A little goes a long way. And I don't use it for much of the painting, I use it more so for unifying values. I want to pull this value out a little bit, keeping in mind that this was my tighter edge. Back on the snack, I've had to move it around a bit so I keep having to redo this part, but that's painting sometimes. I like the idea of adding a teal color right here. I love doing that on edges. So now all these edges in my triangle also have a special color with them, which I have fun with. So play around with that too if you'd like the look of little color changes like that. 17. Painting the Features and Hair: What I want to do now is actually save this reference because I want to pull it up in my camera roll as larger. I'm going to go here to the wrench icon, press "Share". Then let's share a JPEG version of this. Press "Save Image". I'm going to come out of there. I'm going to go to my photos. Here's the image in my photos. What I'm going to do now is actually open up both Procreate and Photos. I'm just going to drag it right there and drop in. Here's my reference open in my Photos , and here's my painting. This process might look different as updates rollout. But I like to do this sometimes so I can see both my reference and the image really big. Let's do a little bit of work actually on the nose. It's getting close, but it's definitely not 100 percent. I'm going to duplicate my painting. Then I want to grab my willow charcoal brush and we're going to have to color pick from my own painting, which is fine at this point since we have everything pretty well established. I want to get everything a little more specific here. I'm just refining this nose right now. This wing of her nose here is not nearly as large as I painted it. I think of it as more of like a greeny color here. I think more like that. She also has this little dark piece right here. I might leave it out just for the sake of simplicity. But let's see what it looks like in. She also has this darker piece in here. That shows the anatomy a little bit better. Here on her nostril, just making that a little darker now. There's a little bit of light that hits right here. I don't want it to pop out too light though. I also see this little highlight on her nose. I'll grab this color as a jumping off point and then I'll just push it a little lighter in value and change up the hue. Let's try it. I'm going to try out a color that's more bluish maybe, maybe purple. You could even outline it with a lighter orange. I don't know. I don't know if I want to keep that in yet. It might be a little too shiny or stylized. Little highlights like this are something you can experiment with until you get the look you want. Just want to use the smudge tool to blend this one in. I'm going to try and stroke some blue across that I think. Just using that smudge tool again. If you want to leave the highlights more painterly or stylized sort of juicy looking as some might call them, just don't blend them. But I'm thinking for this portrait, I want it to be a little more subtle. I'm using the smudge tool and the soft pastel brush to soften the edges. Let's take a look at this eye now. I don't want it to get too overly drawn. Maybe using a brush like the 6B would be better. Back on this nose, I'm just tightening up the edge here. I'm going to grab a cooler gray now and willow charcoal brush. I'm just going to hint at the pupil in this curving water line of the upper lid. This color here at the crease just needs to go warmer. This just needs to have better form. It's a little too sketchy and flat right now. This needs to go warmer as well. Still from that color I'll make it a bit lighter and warmer. You can see here this edge just totally disappears, which is cool. Let's try it out. I can just smudge them into each other. I'm going to grab this teal color and bring it down into here. We can find the edge here. Find it, lose it, find it, you can go back and forth like that. Soft edge, hard edge, soft edge, hard edge. You don't have to give your viewer every little bit of information, just enough. Let's work on this ear a little bit. The ear is a great place to play around with soft and hard edges. I find around here it can be a harder edge and then the lobe can be a bit softer. Here, this area of the antihelix can go a bit sharper, it's shaped almost like a Y. Then we can pop this part of the helix into light. But you really don't have to put in all the details with the ears because we don't want it to take away from the hole. Pushing the color a bit here. I'm going to grab my smudge tool and do a little bit of blending. I'm blending the edges here on the shape, softening out the ends but keeping the center of that shape, I paint it crisp. I find this as another nice way to turn the form, going back-and-forth between soft and hard edges. Backing up the whole ear is a little too contrasty and grabbing just a bit too much attention. I'm going to grab a big brush and with the soft pastel brush and smudge tool, I'll just lightly knock that down. I think that unifies better now with the rest of the face. Let's head back to the neck again. I'm going to grab my soft brush here and I think it just needs to be darkened up right here. I'm going to push that darker and try and put in the pit of the neck again. You got to be careful with the soft brush though because if you press too hard, the values can pop out too quick so I always like to use a really light touch with this brush or even lower the opacity. I'm going to grab the 6B brush again. I'm pressing really lightly because I want to sneak up on this value change. I want to make sure all this gets connected into the shadow. Always thinking around the neck. Here we see a little reflected light right in here, it's really subtle, this is not the easiest reference in the whole world. This goes darker. I'm going to pick up that color and move it over, so slightly lighter. Needs to go a bit lighter. Have the opacity down. What can also help is if I make the curve of the jaw here darker. Chin got a little too pointy so I'll try and fix that. Just defining this highlighted a bit more. I'm going to pick up this color for her eyes. I'll grab this brush. I want this to be so subtle. I'll add a layer on top and then I can adjust the opacity of it individually if I need to. Too much. It's so easy for a simple little mark to take it too far at this point. You want to be able to just pop in a couple of strokes for the eyes and they're done. That comes with setting up the eye on a solid foundation. Hinting at the iris color now. With something as important as the eyes, I definitely take my time. I finally put things in, backup, see if it works. If it doesn't, I try it again. Sometimes pulling the sclera color right into the skin color can work well so the eye doesn't become too tightly drawn. Stroking in some warmth here. Let's take that away for a bit. Taking a look at this, we have to see, did that help it, did it hurt it? Turn that layer off. Turn it on. Is it better if the opacity is down a little bit? Actually, yeah. I like that. Let me merge that down. I think those changes are nice. Let's go ahead and flip it for a new perspective. Let's see about getting in some of these hairs on the side. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate again. I want to get some of these wispy-looking hairs in here. Actually, I'm going to flip it again. It's easier for me to stroke my line in this direction with my hand. Just lightly drawing some curving hairs. What I can do is grab the smudge tool and grab the sand brush. You can pull them right into each other from the skin into the hair and from the hair into the skin. Then go behind with the soft pastel brush. Keep the soft, especially at the start of the lines. We don't want this little detail to overtake everything. Let me grab this hair with grain brush, and I'm just lightly putting a few more hair strokes in. Flipping again. I like to use this brush only after I've established the hair through shapes of value. I like it to add a little bit of texture on top. With hair for me, it's trial and error. I like to put the strokes in confidently and if it doesn't look right, I just undo and retry until it does. If you paint too slowly with hair, your strokes might start to look shaky. Try to approach your mark-making with confidence. You can always undo. Now I'm adding a little more light to the hair at the top of her head here. I'm going to use my turp and paintbrush for a couple of flyaway hairs. Grabbing the smudge tool now, I just want to soften these marks on the neck a bit. 18. Painting the Earring: Let's press forward on this. Now, we're in the stage where we're adding in some of the smaller details. At this point, I'm working all over the piece addressing things as I see them. First on this scarf, let me duplicate my painting. With the willow charcoal brush, I just want to tighten this edge up. I'm just going to soften this area up with the soft pastel smudge. I just want to tighten this edge up using a lighter value. Now, I'm just going to clean up these polka dots on the scarf a little. Something like this. I don't copy it exactly. I just want to capture the essence of it. In here I just want to make sure that scarf makes the turnaround the head. I'm adding that little bit on top of the head to help show how it wraps around the skull. All of this wraps around to the other side. Always be imagining through to the other side of the head. Just a few more hairs here. I'm trying to add that little piece of lid and the light here on the far side of this eye, hinting at a lash, gets a little darker here. Just darkening this area behind the neck. I have to give this earlobe and a little bit more of a defined into it. Just adding a couple more details in the ear. But like I said, backup to make sure you don't add too much. Again, the soft pastel brush works really well to knock it down if you do take it too far with the detail. Also as a note, if you like to paint everything at 100 percent detail, go for it. This is just how I like to achieve a more painterly style. Now, I'm going to go and add a new layer because I want to add in this earring and I think it'll be easier to just do it on its own layer. I'm going to pick up that color. Then I'm going to draw a dot as a sort of anchor point and then I'm just going to shoot it down. Gravity would pull it straight down, so it'll be pretty vertical. Going to grab this dark color. This becomes a little bit of trial and error again, like the hair because I want it to be a competent painterly stroke. It just takes a few times to get it right. Again with something like an earring, I find it's better for me to not copy it. My painting will have more life to it if I just attempt to capture the essence of it. It's not at all an exact match to the reference. I'm just trying to capture the idea of it and with as few strokes as possible. Just using the soft pastel smudge now to soften some edges. Again with something like this, I'm constantly zooming and unzooming to see if it works well from a distance and close-up. Just darkening this area here behind the jaw. I just want to add a little more definition here. I feel like for me, ears and the soft pastel smudge brush, our best friends. It's fun to paint ears with the help of that brush. I keep trying to add this bottom of the earring in with a dark color, but I'm just not sure it needs it. I'll leave it without it and merge that earring down. There's a little light right here that I want to get in, probably reflecting off that earring. Just want to pull the shadow down on the neck a little bit. Behind the ear, I just want to crisp up the edge. You can do that with a thick dark stroke in one spot. You don't have to outline the whole thing. Just an area. 19. Adding Eye Details: Now let's work on this eye a bit. I'm zooming in to grab this highlight color. Putting in that v-like shape at the inner corner of her eye now. Just adding a little bit of a darker value under here. I'm making the sclera area a little bit bigger. Picking up a color for the lashes now. Just adding in a couple of lashes. Here on this far aye, I'm adding a curving line to make sure we get that curve of the upper lid curving around the ball of the eye. A little detail on this nostril. I'm just popping around working on things as I see them. Just start painting this edge up here and just smudging to smooth it out. This bottom lip needs to come up a little. Just hatching in some lines here around that lash line. Picking up that iris color, I want to make it a bit more blue. Just put in some of that in on top of what's there. Hit in the corner of the lips here. Here in the background I have an accidental mark. Just getting rid of that. Just working on the corner of the mouth some more. I want to be sure to keep itself though. I don't think that helped with the lips, so I erase that part out. I'm at the point now where I'm ready for the reference with all the details. I'm going to go to the reference layer and drag the opacity all the way up. Going to duplicate my painting and use my willow charcoal brush. Something that I want to get in is this little piece in here. Getting this little piece in is important in conveying the other side. Just softening this up. Here a little bit more of the skin shows. A couple of brow hairs here and darkening this up. Just cleaning this edge up a little and just refining this brow but more. Adding that curve will help turn it. I'm adding a bit of a darker value here where the lips meet. Then just softening it. I'm curious what the teeth would look like if I added them in. Not really in the how this looks though, so I'm just going to undo back on the eyes now. I'm darkening the eyeliner to help make the eye pop just a bit more. Adding in the pupil now, really lightly stroking in a little bit of blue across the sclera now, now I'm darkening this up, working on the values and the other I know. I'm grabbing from this brown color to add this crease. I want to warm it up a bit though. Just smudging this area a little now. Just softening here. Adding a little bit of that turn of the iris shape. now, making these browse over here a little bit darker. And now I want to just darken up this crease here. Little more on the iris. Just defining this area a little bit better now. I'm not looking at the reference. I'm just going off what I think needs to happen for the painting at this point. Smooth that out. Here under the eye. This got a little too liny so I'm just going to thicken that up and bring it down some. I'm going to add in a couple of lashes. Not copying here, but just putting in a couple of randomly. They're a bit thicker and darker at the root and lighter and wispy or at the ends, they'll often clump into little v shapes. Again, I tried to draw them confidently. So you can always undo and try again if you need to. Add in a bit more here. I'm just lightly using my pencil. I don't want to get too dark and overdo it. Just a little bit more definition here around the nose. I'm going to get that reflected light on the underside of the jaw again. This will help show that stretch of the muscle. Here. I'm just rounding out that shadow shape under the chin. In a little bit more light to that here now. Just a little bit around the edge of the helix here. Back on the scarf now, I want to get this bunching of the fabric here. I think it'll give the scarf some variety. Just looking at values to paint this scarf going in and out of the light. I'm thinking now about how the background and the scarf collide. I want to do something interesting either with the edges are the colors to provide some separation. I'm just playing around a little to see. I want to separate her a little bit better from the background, so I'm experimenting with darkening up the background around her to help her head and face out more. It got a little too smooth so I'm using my eraser tool to erase and reveal my previous version underneath, which is more defined, will have to play around with the background a little more, I think. But for now, I like how this push the piece forward. I'm not sure I like this bluish edge here, so I'll erase that for now. But I think it was worth trying. That's looking good to me at this points, so I'm going to go ahead and merge it down. 20. Finding the Flow of the Piece: I'm just checking out where I've been and where I'm going and I still need to find that separation between the background and her. Let me duplicate my painting. I need the scarf to separate from the background so I'm going to need to do that by either adding a lighter value along the scarf or by adding a darker value in the background. Let me add a new layer and then sample through those ideas. There would be the darker version, which would help her come forward I think, and this is what it would look like if I go lighter on the scarf. Looking at those two ideas, I think going darker is more impactful. Let's just move that and see if it'll work actually. Then I'll just take the smudge tool and smooth the edges. I do that a lot for Marx actually, keep the center of the mark with hard edges and then just smooth out the edges at both ends. An issue I've always seen with this painting was that everything shoots up here. Let me draw that bigger. Everything shoots up and out of the frame. There's such an intense line of action right there that it almost shoots right out of the frame but we don't want our viewers eye to shoot out of the painting, we really need this to shoot back in. I need to come back to that nine approach, Ii does shoot through here, but I need it to curl. I need this imaginary line to curl right back into her face. How do we do that? I think what we need is something here to make that turn. So perhaps a sharper edge or it could even be a shoot out here but maybe then I can shoot back down. That can be done with something like a background element. If I grab this brush and I started shooting some lines downward, that can bring us back in maybe. Let me try maybe a combination of both of those ideas. Like that, I'm going to merge it down then I'm going to duplicate my painting and delete this layer I'm not using. Let me pick up this dark color here and just start giving this ago. Here I'm shooting some lines down to hopefully bring us back into the painting. Now I'm going to try and sharpen this edge here by making these two touching values have more contrast between them, so where the hair meets the background. I'm going to make the background darker so that the edge there becomes a little less fuzzy and can help make that turn back into the composition. Now I feel the need to balance that mark on the opposite side, that'll help frame or in better. A lot of this stuff is about experimentation, taking chances, and trying some stuff out. Now let me grab my eraser and reset back out. I'll grab this brush instead. Let me go ahead to my layers and play around with the opacity's lighter. Obviously I did too much, but was there a happy medium? I think a little bit of that does help. Maybe like that. Let's merge that down. Duplicating the painting now. I think I want to get this turn at the top of her head. Maybe we need a couple of flyaway hairs here. I'm lightening this up here again. I want to show the scarf turning around the roundness of the head. A couple of these little lighter hairs might also help make that turn. Maybe even something like a little color moment might help too. I'm hoping that these things combined are enough to plant my viewer's eyes back on her face. Thinking about these eyes again now, thinking side-to-side. Make sure it is often the beginning of any hair strokes at the hairline. You don't want to see individual lines here or it'll look a little odd, so keep it soft. What also might help us is tightening up an edge like the shoulder. It swoops and then gets to this tightened shoulder. Maybe it's a little too loose right there. I'm going to turn it upside down and grab my 6B brush. With this brush, it has that sharper edge only on one side so that's why I'm turning it like this. That helps it flow a bit better. Adding a little bit of that shoulder back in now. I'm defining the chin just a bit, just softening this transition here. Looking back and forth, I think those things did help bring focus back to the face and back into the painting. I'm just going to merge these few layers down. 21. Finishing the Painting and Sharing: Let's wrap up this piece, shall we. Also, if you made it this far, good for you. Thank you so much for watching and you should really be proud of the dedication you're putting into your learning. I hope you won't mind, but this last bit will just be a screen recording. I can get right on top of my iPad to get in those final details. Go into my layers, I'm going to duplicate my painting. Zooming in, I'm just adding some slightly darker eyeliner to this upper lash line. Now I'm rounding out her iris shape a little bit. Now I'm going to grab that sclera color and make it just a bit lighter. Something that's been bothering me a bit is her head is projecting just a little too much. I'm going to go to my painting layer swipe right with two fingers to turn off Alpha Lock. Then go to adjustments, liquefy. I'm going to push the size way up. Then just pull her face in a bit. This is one of those major benefits of digital painting. Obviously this is a lot easier than a traditional mediums where this would be impossible. Now I'm going to grab my willow charcoal streamline brush, and I'm going to work on this interquartile of the eye. Here I'm just darkening up the side of the nose bridge a bit. Then smoothing out with the soft pastel smudge brush. A little more smoothing here above the lip and I'm just adjusting the earring a little, making that middle stroke a bit brighter. Now with a soft brush, I tried to soften around the hairline but it doesn't look quite right. Now, I'm just soften around the forehead, pressing really lightly. Just darkening now with the big soft brush between the neck and the shirt and around where the hair meets the skin. The soft brush is another one of those brushes that can work really well to unify at the end of a piece. Just checking to see if I liked the adjustments. I'm liking that, so I'm going to duplicate my painting and alpha lock it again by swiping right with two fingers on the layer. Then with a big soft brush, I'm just going to put that over the whole painting. Then I'm going to tap the N on the layer and change the blend mode to multiply and drag the opacity down. Actually, I'm going to change the blend mode to soft light because, I like the look that's given. Now I'm going to take the eraser tool and a big soft brush, and I'm just going to softly erase outer face and the areas just around it. This is something I like to do to unify a piece and give it a vignette effect. I find it really helps the focal point, her face to stand out more. Now I'm using a smaller brush to erase out the areas that pop in a light. Some artists will also use a layer mask, and that's probably the smarter way to do it. But I just like to erase out because I like to be decisive with it. Sometimes if I use a layer mask, I'll leave the door open to too many options and for a brain like mine, I just become indecisive. Always zooming in and out at this point especially and turning things off and on to see if it pushes the piece towards the end. Now I want to dye down that rusty color in the inner eye a bit. It's a little too saturated. I'll go across the color wheel to the complement and add in some hatching lines to knock that down a bit and saturation. Picking up this highlight at the tip of the nose now, just adding that end to be a bit brighter. Then just softening the edges with the smudge brush. Just darkening this edge against the forehead to sharpen it a bit more and I like where this is now. I'm going to add a paper texture on top of all this. I'm going to go to actions add insert a photo. I'm going to grab one of my favorite paper textures to use from an artist named Cat Jello. I will have this texture available for you to use to in the resources section. I just put it right on top and press the ''N''. Then from there I'm just scrolling through the blend mode options. But when adding a texture like this, I find I typically use linear burn or multiply. In this adds such a nice visual texture to paintings, almost like a traditional painting. You can also adjust the opacity until it's the level you prefer. You can also adjust the size of the paper to affect how large or small the texture looks on the painting. I like this a lot, but I want to erase out a couple of parts that I want to keep smooth. Here on the collar and in the hair, I think I'd like to keep those a bit smoother. Now I'm just experimenting with the opacity and the blend modes on the paper texture a little more. Just playing around with it until it seems just right. At this point I'm ready to wrap this piece up. I typically like to do that in Photoshop. I like using Photoshop because it helps me see my piece from a new perspective on a new screen, and I just like adding some of the very final touches in Photoshop. It also makes storing my art files on my computer really easy. If you don't have Photoshop though, no worries. I'll show you how you can crop this and finish this piece in Procreate at the timestamp below. But for now I'm going to swipe left on my painting and press "Duplicate". Then go ahead and open the duplicate image. Then to make the file smaller for when I Airdrop it over to my computer, I'm just going to pinch and merge these layers and swipe left to delete them. Then I'm actually going to move this vignette layer under here so I can pinch and merge all these. Then I'm just going to delete all these references I don't need. Now I have this more condensed version of the painting that I can AirDrop over without much wait time. I'll go to Actions, Share, PSD. It'll export. Then I'll tap "AirDrop" and send it to my computer. Now my computer we can see in layers. I have four layers which are the background, which is just the canvas, the reference, the painting, and the paper texture layer on top. I'm actually going to merge those top two. I think I'm ready for that and I want to work on them combined. Describing the Rectangular Marquee tool and pressing "Command X" on my keyboard to delete this part of the paper that overhangs. Now I'm going to right-click the painting layer and press "Duplicate". I'm going to grab the Dodge Tool. I like using the Dodge Tool in Photoshop because it gives a little bit oomph to the lighting. I'm using a soft airbrush and trying that out lightly on some of the parts in the light. Here before and after it adds just a little bit of glowiness to the light. I'm going to lower the opacity of it. I like that so I'm going to merge them together. Now I'm going to go ahead and grab the crop tool and crop the painting. Zoom in and tuck in the edges here, and double-click to crop. Got to tuck in the side just a little more. Just adjusting a bit more. I think this is good. Now I like this but I just want to try the vignette one more time to unify this even more. I'm going to add a new layer and then grab the Paint Bucket tool and fill the Canvas with this darker color. Maybe a little bit warmer and darker. Then I'm going to use the eraser tool and a big fluffy airbrush to reveal her. I like how this can frame in a portrait. Then scrolling through blending modes here, I like it on multiply. Just adjusting the brush settings here. Looking back and forth, I like how these frames are in. I think it just needs to go a little bit darker in the top-left corner. Just tweaking until it feels right. Just lowering the fill some. I like that so I'll shift select, right-click and merge layers. Now I'm going to grab that little band-aid looking tool in the toolbar called the Spot Healing Brush because I see a little odd spot on the edge of the painting that I want to fix. Now I'm finally finished the painting. I'm going to right-click a layer and press "Merge Visible", so that all my visible layers will be merged into one. You can also flatten the image. Now I'm going to save this as a high-quality JPEG. Format, JPEG. I'll call it painting high-quality, and embed color profile with this sRGB profile. I'll save it to my desktop and press "Save", and then I save it with maximum quality. Now, with that high-quality version opened up, let's make a duplicate and make a resized version for sharing on the Internet. I press this right here to duplicate the whole piece, and I'll just excel my high-quality version. Now on the duplicate, I'll go to image, image size. Then I like to make the size anywhere 1000-1200,1100, usually on the shorter side. Then after I resize, I like to sharpen it a bit. In my layers, I'm going to duplicate the painting layer, and then I'll go to Filter, Sharpen, Sharpen. That makes the image just a little bit sharper, which does well for viewing on the Internet. You can adjust the opacity of that as you wish. I like that. I'll go to File, Save As on your computer. Save a copy, and I'll make it a JPEG, embed the color profile and call it a painting resized and press "Save", and "Okay". It will automatically merge it down to one layer for me. Here's the finished piece. If you want to crop and resize and procreate, you can. Go ahead and go to your gallery view and then swipe left and press "Duplicate". Then go on your duplicate image. We're going to crop this in. Let's go to Actions, Canvas, Crop and Resize. Then I'm just going to drag that in. Once you're finished, just press "Done". Now we have a nice high-quality version of this finished painting. Now going back to gallery, just swipe left and press "Duplicate". We'll make this one a resized version. If you want to, you can also merge all your layers with a little pinch. Then I'm going to go to Actions, Canvas, Crops and Resize. From here, press "Settings", turn on re-sample Canvas. Then again from here I'd like to do anything from around 1,000-1,100 on the shorter side, and then press done "Done". It resized the canvas for me. Then we're going to go to Adjustments, Sharpen. Then from here what you can do is slide your finger to get the exact level of sharpness you'd like. I like to sharpen my images a bit for viewing on the Internet. I find it's a nice final touch. Then to share your painting from procreate, just go to Actions, Share. Then I usually just like to save it as a JPEG. Then from here you can AirDrop it, email it, message it, whatever works for you. Then on Skillshare, head to the projects and resources section of class and click "Create Project". There you can upload your class project. Share and look into your process for painting this piece or just share your finished work, whatever you're comfortable with. Please feel welcomed to share what you're struggling with. Fun things you've learned, or maybe brushes you've enjoyed trying, just anything about your experience. I'd love to hear and I'm sure other students will too. Also, if you'd like help or a critique, please let me know in your project upload. Checkout everyone else's projects too. It's so fun to paint a piece together and see how we each tackled different problems. Let's share our experiences and encourage each other too in the project section. I'm looking forward to seeing your work. 22. Time Lapse: If you'd like to see a time-lapse of this painting, here it is. This can perhaps be a nice recap of everything we did. [MUSIC] 23. Closing Thoughts: [MUSIC] Thank you so much for joining this class. I hope you enjoyed painting along with me. I would love to see your take on this portrait. Please upload your works in progress or your finished painting to the projects and resources section. If you have any questions, please let me know. I'm happy to help. If you are interested in learning more with me, I have foundational art classes as well as many more courses on drawing and painting, specializing and characters, and portraits. If that interests you, I would love to see you in those classes too. If you enjoyed this class, I'd be so painful if you could leave a review. It really helps more people find this course and I so appreciate it. If you would like to stay updated on future classes to come, be sure to follow along for new releases. Thank you so much again for joining the class. I hope you had fun and I cannot wait to see what you create. Until next time, happy painting.