Little bit of gray

When I went in search of more tutorials I cracked open "The Famous Artists Course" lesson 16: Color–the theory and practice of painting. From that it sounded as if you should do your painting in grayscale first, it said to get better control of your values (shadows and highlights). That seemed to go with what I've seen around. The artists that I think are good, they all seem to start out with the image in grayscale. Saved the hair for last cause I thought it was going to be the hardest but it ended up being the easiest. I got some pretty good feed back on this some people thought I used a program to manipulate the photograph.

Process: Photoshop and Cintiq. Laying down a gray under tone to get started. Then setting my brushes flow to 3 and drawing in the shadows and highlights. I got a real sense of drawing when I was doing this, felt like I had more control.

The hair was done on it's own layer with some brushes that where made up of dots (3-6) and just made a bunch of swirls until I got the overall shape I wanted then on another layer beneath this I put white using just a circle brush, but then the hair was too bright so I add yet another layer between the hair and the white layer and made more swirls the fill in some of the gaps.