Portrait Sketch

I was very disappointed to be unable to attend my monthly figure painting session today. So, in self defence, I broke out the digital paintbox to attempt a quick study.

Most of my recent posts have been comics and cartoon related, but I have been looking at trying some of the painting tools in SketchBook Pro and MangaStudio 5, just to see how they stack up against my elderly version of Photoshop. And I have been very pleased with their performance.

This is an invented head, painted in SBP. I used only one brush out of a potential multitude of choices and a very limited palette. It very much resembles a first pass or rough block in with oils. Unfortunately I didn't save enough separate files to show the progression to get to this point, for which I kick myself. I'll try to do better next time... And someone has been urging me to do some screen recording videos for YouTube, so that may be in the near future as well.

I expect to spend a little more time with this one, and try to refine it to a higher degree of finish than anything else I have attempted in the digital studio. And the beauty of digital is that I can make changes on new layers and only keep the successful bits.

While I'm sorry to have missed an afternoon with my painting friends, this has been a very worthwhile afternoon's dabbling. I think this has great possibilities.