Digital Portrait Painting

For this week the project I was working on was a digital portrait painting, which I really enjoyed and ended up with an artwork that I'm really happy with! Here's the process that I went through to get to the final piece:

I started off with a portrait photograph that contained strong shadows and highlights which would help me when distinguishing the values I wanted to use later.

I then went in and added a line art layer where I could outline the subject and then on another layer I added some ground colour so there would be some consistency in the background. 

Once I had the outline of the portrait I went in and added in my dark values on a separate layer with a textured brush to add a bit more of a painted look.

Finally, I made a highlight layer where I added that extra bit of brightness to certain areas to add more contrast to my painted portrait. The above picture is the final result. 

This project definitely made me explore my brushes and techniques further and helped me learn more about the overall process that I can apply to future artworks.