Portrait of @sweetsssj digital drawing - process and description inside:)

This is the second time I draw @sweetsssj, a bit challenging for me in fact and that's why I like doing it), cause depicting Asian beauty is not yet my strong side. Even despite the fact I was always interested in the culture:)

So, at first I tried to start with line art, but I even fear to show you what came out. I usually start with a really rough sketch to catch all the proportions (classic ones, where it's considered that our face divides to three equal parts from the hair line to the nose bridge, from bridge to lips and from lips to chin. If you don't draw and hear it for the first time you can check it out now in front of the mirror:) By the way the distance between your eyes is most likely to be the size of one eye. Now live with it:).  But here, with Asian beauty it worked not quite well for me. I quickly understood that if I'll go in like this I'll never catch these mild facial features that make steetsssj so beautiful. So I stepped from another side.

First of all let me show the final result, then I'll write about the process:

I used the first photo from this post as a reference. And now how I worked with it. When I understood that starting from line art will not work for me here I changed my strategy and started with a spot. Just figuring out where face, neck and hair will be. For me it's always a scary way to start the portrait cause I'm never sure that I'll catch the proportions right, but ere I had to try, to keep everything really mild. 

Here I already know what the brightest parts will be. Usually it's the nose tip, apex of cheekbone, chin and upper the eyebrows. But the most light spot is definitely the nose tip. So here I only marked nose a bit, found where eyes must be, and now settle the shading. Yet no work with the hair, just a massive of color.

I have passion to always draw eyes first, I feel so much more comfortable when model already "looks". By the way my teacher in art school always argued me for that, telling that one has to work with whole picture at ones, so it must look less or more finished on any stage. So, here I finally tried to force myself to follow his advice, and only underlined eyes first, and then jumped to work with hair.

Usually I draw the whole picture with one single digital brush, as I would do IRL. But for rendering hair it's convenient for me to use another one, with lots of small dots. It allows to render quicker, cause I don't have to draw every hairspray separately, but can create some massive with few motions. By the way drawing each hairspray separately definitely is my bad habit.

I resisted creating the eyes not for long time. But at least I managed not to stuck on them for whole night. In fact my will to draw them first is completely natural, we all subconsciously seek for the eye contact. I love putting a lot of light and shading in all parts of the eye, and since I  always started with them before earlier it always was the part of face I always put most effort in.

One more proportions trick here. considered lips. When you need to seek where the tips of lips must be - drop perpendicular from the pupils. And in most cases you'll find exactly the points where the lips tips will be. But it works best if the model is full face and looks directly at you. In all the other cases pretend it to be so:) And here, with the type of light on the picture, upper lip is darker then the lower one, because the lower one catches more light.

I didn't manage quite well with Asian shape of nose, but really tried o do my best:) As I already said the brightest part is nose tip. And I really tried to make the rest really mild and tender. 

Almost there here, just yet need to make more deep shading on the parts of the face which are in the shade, and still need to add earrings:) In fact the earrings were  one of the main reasons why I chose exactly this photo to draw from - I loved them so much. So bright and colorful:)

Of course I could put more effort in drawing metal here, but again I just stopped myself. One more thing I still need to improve in me drawing technique is keeping the focal point. All the image can't be in the same level of focus, it avoids creating the illusion of depth. So here I tried to keep less focused the earrings, neck and t-shirt. 

A lot of bokeh effect was my solution for exactly this portrait background. It seems to me really suitable.

Sign, and here we are:) Hope you enjoyed the proces and the picture, and if you yet never saw @sweetsssj's blog  - you definitely should check it out. Really informative and inspiring travel blog here on steemit.

Thank you for voting and commenting:)

Love, Inber