Make-up test

Those of you fol­low­ing me on tum­blr will have seen this image come up again…and again…and again…at var­i­ous stages in the process. This was a test on two things: to cre­ate a mostly real­is­tic por­trait of one of my char­ac­ters, and to finally get around to doing an improved ver­sion of the pre­vi­ous make-up test, this time by giv­ing myself a base face, and then paint­ing on top of that, with the final goal of get­ting some­thing look­ing like a fash­ion shoot.

Here’s a quick sum­mary of the things I learned/did:

• I like to refine a picture.
• It’s hard to see in the web-friendly ver­sions, but for the top two faces I tex­tured the skin by run­ning a dry-brush over it, fol­low­ing the main mus­cles. This had the side effect of light­en­ing the skin and uni­fy­ing the colour — and I also used it to exag­ger­ate the sat­u­ra­tion in some parts. Next time I’ll try using a sponge instead.
• I’m a bit less appre­hen­sive of soft-edge, glazy brushes now. This pic­ture made much more use of soft gra­da­tions and gen­tler edges than what I’m nor­mally used to.