#i want to get a specific look from my realism so i strayed from tutorials

[consulting-cannibal]

could you do a tutorial for drawing realistic faces? the faces of your rob paintings are so perfectttt

I WILL DO MY BEST OK so

this..i mean, this is just how i personally do it. there are probably better ways. i freehand, but i’ve been freehanding portraits for like a decade now, so note that practice is the key to this

so say you wanna paint some @stardustandmelancholy work. and whattaya know! what you wanna paint is mr. rob. nice. first thing’s first, i do a rough sketch. i mean, this is like, unpaved freshly dumped gravel rough. it’s just to give me a feel for my canvas and help me have a target to aim for with my guides

this is the reason i do digital instead of traditional–during this part i erase a lot (PRAISE THE UNDO), but i start blocking in a grid. if you see the face in squares, it’s basically all laid out for you. you can actually draw the features in as shapes at this point, but i am always too lazy to do this. it generally just leads to more erasing for myself

once i have my grid (which, doing this traditionally, i sometimes use a ruler to compare distances between features. with digital, you can do the same thing, actually–ps has a ruler! it’s with the eyedropper in CS5) i take a thicker brush to start doing actual facial features. these’re vague and sometimes where i stop if i’m not doing anything exciting with the sketch.

after that, i take a thin brush, and go over the sketch with correct/closer proportions/line weights. i’ll keep my sketch close and my reference closer. i’ll actually map out where the shadows are when i’m going to go in after it and paint. this seems meticulous, but once you do it a million times over, it becomes second nature and pretty dang speedy. you may struggle with proportions now, but once you’ve drawn enough faces (or the same one a lot!) you get a feel for where things should be anyway

once i have my finished sketch, i’ll go in with color, and that’s just a gradual build. the brush i used for it is actually just my sketch brush i used above, but with tablet pressure opacity enabled:

a lot of times in my life i’ve heard “YOU CAN’T JUMP AROUND A PAINTING! YOU HAVE TO FOCUS ON ONE PART UNTIL IT’S FINISHED” and that is…..no

no for me, that is.

say i get bored with a part of the beard, there’s a reason why, and it’s generally because it’s not coming together right. so you bet your sweet buns i’m gonna randomly drop working on a beard to work on a hat any day, because once i do that, i figure out why the beard was so boring and i make it exciting for myself again

learning art is different for everyone, and there is no set way. realism is difficult because you know what a face looks like, and you just want it to be. but you just gotta treat it like everything else! i can’t give many more technical or specific tips or tricks (i’m self-taught, so i really can’t help the way someone who knows how to teach this could) but i hope that gives you a little insight!