Movie still study 2 progress shots

I liked the monochrome drawing phase so I decided to keep a file of it and then thought it'd be cool to show the process, unfortunately I got too caught up in the block-in and forgot to save it at an earlier time so it's already pretty advanced sorry! film-grab.com/2015/03/08/ginge… the reference photo can be found here!

It's pretty unusual for me to do such an elaborate preparatory drawing, but it seems like I'm up for anything today! The drawing took about an hour, stage 2 is about 2h in, stage 3 is 2h30 and the whole took 3h to do.

A sound drawing takes a bit of time but it allows you to take on drawing problems separately from value and edge problems and thus prevents you from getting to that point where you really just want to kill yourself.
The second stage took an hour to block in, it's really important to get this right so take as much time as you need. Generally what I do is find the middle tones of the large planes of the face first, and then break up the smaller ones very slowly. Don't try getting the features down right away, the idea is that with the correct structure and modelling of the face, the features will just simply fall into the right places.
Now, something that I've had a lot of trouble with for a long time is getting nice edges, I was always obsessed with finding good brushes to get these nice soft transitions of color but that's not it. I honestly don't really know what i'm doing differently from 6 months ago but there's definitely a huge difference when I compare this to previous studies (looking at my first attempts from a year ago haha). It's a mixture of better drawing, better understanding of values, staying zoomed out and using larger brush sizes (i use the default Photoshop brushes but i don't use the smudge tool or any kind of blur/liquify though i'd like to try playing with it).
A good way to proceed is getting a nice block-in with the correct values at their right places without getting too fussy about pretty transitions of color, just use a really primitive round brush. You'll then bridge every tile of color with another intermediate step using slightly transparent brushes, using ones that have a bit of texture is a plus (like the one used in the background).
Also, for getting the right colors and values, I don't think picking the colors directly on the reference photo is necessarily bad, but it will give you bad habits and it doesn't work well at all on messy jumbles of color like hair. I'd recommend getting a color and putting it on the photo itself, that way you can get the right values without the photo forcing the temperature or the saturation of the color on you, it allows you to judge the average color of an area like on fur or hair, and it's not really cheating since the old masters basically did this all the time too!


I don't know if this is of any help but I hope so! I know I'm always looking to find out the methodology of other artists.

Hope you like it and thanks for viewing!