I decided to try the grayscale sketch today and I must confess I love it. It's less stressful, I mean trying to figure out which skin color or tone would best fit my work while sketching, so instead, doing the grayscale sketch and then adding the skin color after what seemed much easier and saved me some time too. I will be doing more grayscale sketches now that I have realized it could save time lol.

So today I made a portrait, I wouldn't wanna say whose portrait it is. I was out of inspiration and my imaginary art was failing me so I decided to make a portrait from a photo in my gallery. I choose one with the back view. I believe I have been so used to the front view portraits so I decided to try something quite different today.

I started with an outline sketch. Looking through my work process, you will notice how I kept changing my hair, right from the outlines. I love leaving very fine details on my hair and I have mentioned before that hair seems to be one of the things I love mostly whenever I draw and I always try my best not to leave it looking bad or not to my taste. Although I am still learning how to make better hairstyles and patterns.

From my work process, you will notice how I started the hair sketch which is the inner outline you see in my first work process, but I didn't seem to like it so I later increased the size of the hair to what I believe is much better than the initial. And I hope you love the finals too lol.
And like I stated earlier, I tried the grayscale sketch. I only focused on the skin, while the clothing was colored from start to finish.

Sketching and detailing the skin is always such a huge work so I decided to leave it in the grayscale and then when I was done with the shadows, highlights, and textures, I then adjusted the grayscale mode and added the colors I needed for the work. I love this approach, it seems much easier for me.
I didn't even bother with complicated backgrounds although I spent some time tasting different background colors and still didn't like any until I settled with this.
Check out my work with the steps below.

Work Process

             22 September 2022
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                Thursday