Mission portrait

This actually is not a portrait of anyone on my mission. Just a quick sketch I did when I had the time.
I am starting to get back into the feel of using a drawing tablet for digital art, as I was only able to use traditional medium at the time. (Which, at times, was restricted to a few pens and a highlighter).
This one is not quite finished yet, and I am not too sure if I ever want to finish it.

But a few things that I have learned from doing this. And a few things that I discovered after forgetting them after two years. One of these things, is laying out a color pallet before you get started painting. This has helped me understand the kind of lighting I have and also keeps me from making the painting too busy with a variety of colors. In order to get correct skin tones and tones of other materials, you do need a wide range of color. But, in most cases, most of the work can be don’t with a limited pallet, and then, when finishing up a painting, additional colors can be added.
One other things that I relearned, was the wonderful uses of the airbrush tool. As I was painting this, I relied heavily on the brush tool. Although most of the light/dark transitions can be achieved using this tool, I was strugling with smoothing out some rather sharp transistions. This is where the airbrush comes in. After laying down your colors for your lights and your darks, and after creating the basic transistion from your lights to your darks, the airbrush tool can be used to smooth the transistion in the places needed. Just use the color picker tool to select an already existing color within the transition you wish to smooth out, and begin smoothing the transition. I find using the color picker tool to constantly change to a different tone within the transition, will create a good transition with out reducing the amount of color in your work. If you don’t have a tablet dropping the opacity of the tool to 20% or so should do the trick. If you have a tablet just make sure that the opacity is turned on for the pressure sensitivity, and see those hard transitions go smooth.