Mr.M Art Contest #1 Entry

It's time for another entry, but this one has a special meaning. It's for @melooo182's Art Contest #1 ✏️ / 🎭 Week's Theme: The Family 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 💙🐋.
It really warmed my heart to share with you the portraits of my parents from their youth.
In the early 2012 I was asked from my grandmother to make a present for their 35 years of marriage.
After a lot of thinking decided to make a matching portraits, each one printed and framed in size A3 for the wall in their bedroom.

The Pencil Sketch
Before making the digital illustrations, I had to do a few traditional sketches.
The first is tiny portrait of my father on some random paper:

It was so long ago, I still had no habit of making WIPs. ^^'

Watercolor Portraits
Next was an experiment with watercolors.
This time I used different reference photos, but wasn't very satisfied with the results.
You can clearly see that I'm not very good with this traditional technique. So it's better to move on to digital. ;)

Digital Portraits
I found some really old photo of my mom when she was a teenage girl. She doesn't have many (not like us and selfies today, haha), but this was especially nice and very photogenic.
So I started to build her face from the ground up.
You can see the work in progress here:

The photo was black and white, but I wanted to add some color as a contrast between the figure and the background. Also added some vintage flowers (I have to make a study where a took them from, don't remember, urgh, what's wrong me these days)...

...and the final version:

It was fairly easy with the other portrait. I had the background as a base, all I need to do was flipping it horizontally and paint the face.

Here are the works in progress - fewer than the previous one:

...the final version...

For the skin I used separate layer with a paper texture overlay on very low opacity. That actually did the trick. ^^
That's about it.
Overall, they were very pleased with the result so this is most important. <3

Hope you like them!
^.^ Have a nice day, everyone! ^.^
Thank you for stopping by!