So.... I forgot to take a picture of the step between the finish and the previous step... Therefore, this is the combined final superstep! Opaque paint and then colored pencil on top for detail and texture. For the opaque painting, I use heavy-body acrylics. Straight from the tube. Little to no water. Golden is my favorite brand, because it is the heaviest, but Liquitex is good, too. Whatever you use, just make sure it's professional-quality stuff, not student or artist-grade. Cheap products yield cheap-looking results! My palette is limited: titanium white, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, and ultramarine blue, plus some more black for tidying up his tux. But I'm now avoiding black for the face. Any more and it will gray things off. I can mix just about anything with this palette, including plenty of very dark skin tones and dark hair, so black is unnecessary. The whole opaque stage is about refinement. Careful control of the edges. Spotting areas of saturation and picking out the details. But tread light; this is the part where you may turn the whole thing into a thick painting. You don't want to lose all the work of the previous layers by mashing a bunch over the top of everything. Be selective and critical. Use you eye and really try to discern. Ask yourself, "what about this differs from the reference?" Then systematically correct your work until you bring it as close as you feel like going. Just try not to get too tight, or it'll look less like a painting and more like a photocopy... To each their own! I found the forehead to be especially challenging during this stage. Not overemphasizing his wrinkles while also maintaining the turn of his head into shadow, and all the time not getting my values confused or making him look like plastic was... a chore. To say the least. But with a lot of patience and a bit of my trademark stubbornness, I think it came out all right. The second area of extreme nuance was his right cheek. After airbrushing it, it felt very one-dimensional to me. Too smooth. But any time I tried to add interest or color play, it broke the realism for me, making it not look right. So instead, most of what I did ended up in the colored pencil stage. Speaking of... Now I don't have a picture of what it looked like without the colored pencil, but it could have been a finished artwork at that point. Which meant going in with my trusty Prismacolor Premiers was nothing but pure play! Expressing the beautiful marks and shapes I see in the reference with as much visual interest as I can get away with. Being careful not to turn him into chalk with too much white, I start by hatching in some highlights and finishing his hair. If you look closely, you may see where I accidentally tore the paper with a white Prismacolor Verithin.... Oh no! Be careful with those! A little patching and then I gave him a fairly heavy outline (to help him stand out against the background) and tidied up some shapes with black, especially around the eyes. And then it was various subtle colors: peach, different grays, chestnut... blue, red... warm and cool... barely pressing... Until... It's finished! Let me know what you think! Did I overwork it? I feel like it's a little overwrought. Couldn't be helped, though. I struggled a bit in the home stretch. Still learning, still experimenting, still finding my voice, and most of all, having fun and sharing it with you all. Who should I do next? Are there any fans of old movies here on Proko? I know it's a faux pas in the art world to paint celebrities, but these are practically historical figures at this point, haha, who were always fair game in fine art. Plus, if I can paint a portrait of a famous person to where they are instantly recognizable, then I believe it's proof that I can paint anyone's portrait and have it look like them. And that's most of the point of painting someone, isn't it? To have it look like them?

Here's where things come alive, and suddenly you've got a picture. The airbrush stage. The bane of many artists existence, haha. I'm not using it to do much color work; really all I'm using it for is to soften edges (sometimes too much), fix values, and smooth out the harder underdrawing lines. This heightens the realism to the next level with just a few colors, in this case only one color (a dark/orangy ochre skin tone), and white and black. Since I'm not great with the airbrush and inevitably go too far and make things too soft here, in the next step I'll come in with opaque, heavy-body paint. Bring back the refinement, as well as punch up the saturation and color accuracy where things are still too gray. But until then... Stay tuned! Thanks!

This is what I call the first pass with color. Simple washes. What I do for this step is make my acrylic as watery as possible. 75-90 percent water for every color, to make it as thin and transparent as possible, and apply with a flat brush in broad strokes. I suppose it can be done with watercolor, gouache, etc., but I have a ton of acrylics so that's what I used. And I can go this thin with the acrylic without fear of the paint not adhering to the paper because it is, in fact, raw paper, so it soaks in. If this was gessoed board, I would probably skip this step and go right for the airbrush, which I use a medium with to ensure adhesion. But that's my next step, so stay tuned for that. All I'm interested in at this stage is local color. What is plain skin, what is warm skin, and what is cool skin. Not thinking too much about values or anything else. I can let the pencil and black underlayers do the heavy lifting in that regard, at least for now. After spraying with a workable fixatif and waiting at least an hour, my first mix is a very basic skin tone (one part cadmium red light, one part permanent green light, one part titanium white, and a ton of water). I apply this evenly over the whole area of skin in layers, building the tone in spots where it needs to be darker by applying subsequent layers of the same skin tone. This gives some form, but is kind of flat being one color, so then I go in with the warms and the cools. A pea-sized amount of alizarin crimson in one jar, the same in phthalo blue in another, then thinned down in a similar manner. I probably should have gone with a green, as it would've matched my reference better, but the point is warm and cool, not necessarily color accuracy. And the blue goes over the skin color as more of a gray, so it's fine. Blue or green in a reference means grayer anyway. I carefully go across my reference and pick out where it's warmer and where it's cooler, and wash it in. The result gives body and life to the wash layer and makes it easier to unify in the subsequent layers with the airbrush, and then thicker paint. To darken the jacket and the hair, I just used a few washes of black. This technique is all about layers. Each layer should look as complete as you can manage, so when you get to the next one, it'll just get better and better. It builds with patience, but the results can be astonishing. Thanks for looking! As always, questions and comments, critiques, whatever, hit me up!

You think your drawing is dark enough... and then you go in with the black! I'm using black Liquitex gesso straight from the bottle, except for the splatters where I've watered it down and flicked it on with an old toothbrush. Why gesso, you may ask? Not regular paint? Well, it's a secret! I can't tell you! So there. Huh? You promise to keep it to yourself? Oh... okay. Pinky swear? Okay... Fine! Gesso has a slightly better consistency than heavy body black acrylic for direct painting. Regular paint needs to be watered down, and at that point it's practically like ink, which we don't want. We want texture. Brush marks. But nothing that's going to stand up off the surface like heavy body paint does. You could probably use fluid acrylics too, but I like gesso. It adds texture, and texture is king at this point. The more noise you have now, the better it will blend in later and give your finished work a nice painterly feel. So that's the reason... It's definitely not because that's all I had on hand... The black is the scariest part, I think, but it's like Stephen Bauman said on the stream the other day: "Gotta break the seal!" You think it's ruined, but it's not. Trust the process. If you're strategic at this stage, and really squint your eyes to determine only the darkest darks, it stays true. And that's the key. Only the darkest darks go black. Anything that isn't black in the reference, don't paint it black now. You'll use color for that. Layers and layers. That way it doesn't go flat. For now it should look almost like pop art. That's good. Not a lot to say about the technique here. Just grab a decent brush, dip it in the black, and paint it in. You want a solid foundation for your washes to go over, to soften, to bring depth.

Do you spray this graphite stage with a matte fixative or anything before going to the color washes? Would love to know what grade graphite you're starting with too, looks like a nice rich soft pencil. Thanks for sharing your workflow, excited to see the progress!

Good likeness