This is my best cg to date but it's not that hard to beat my previously best cg effort (Link in Red). XD I found the reference on the web, and I thought the pose and expression was a bit unusual (quite different from the other pics I've seen of O'Toole or Lawrence of Arabia related pics). It's different enough that I wanted to try to draw it. Another reason why I decided to draw this was that I wanted to learn how to cg faces better and the best way of learning is by using a photo reference with good light source.

This little project has three challenges--expression, the pose, and to produce something that actually looked like the person. It was pretty easy to get a good general shape for the line art, but it's really, really hard to get everything in the correct proportion. Ever notice that little change in proportion can screw up the entire picture? I kept hounding my friend Amel and asking her for critiques so many thanks to Amel! In the end, after I scanned the pic, I still had to adjust the size of the eyes. Curse me for drawing large eyes too often.

CG and doing the lineart took up about equal amount of time. I tried a cg different technique this time. I decreased the opacity of the brushes and instead of using same colors but different shades, I used different colors all together (red, peach, brown, and yellow for the face). I really like the end result because the skin tone looks more life like than my previous cg attempts. The wrinkles and the small creased helped the pic look less like plastic.

The clothes turned out to be a bigger challenge than expected. I sorta freaked out when I couldn't immediately think of a good way of replicating the texture of the textile. Again, clothes was colored using low opacity brush strokes and I added some blotches to generate a slightly rough texture. I also added some reds and orange color to add more shading and interest.

I got lazy so I didn't bother to do a real background.

So what did I learn? Using photos can really help you understand the behavior of light. It's nifty to see that light reflects off of many things, even one's skin. Also, it was fun to look at the way the fabric folds.

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