Week 5 Self Portrait

R e s t .

Had to take a break from all these polygons for a day and what's the best way to take a break from art than making more art?

Some outtakes from this painting:
I think it helped me greatly to prepare for sculpting and texturing face of my character ( I want to include view with the helmet off, character holding it). I learnt a lot on 3d forms and portraying them in 2D to achieve realism & likeness.
My goal was to have every stroke have its purpose but also to keep brush strokes to my advantage by keeping them larger and looser around the area of focus where for contrast I used smaller strokes.
I think I have achieved this but I'd like to improve my material rendering next time as areas like skin, hair and cloth could use more definition.
Another thing is I wanted to play with lighting to accentuate certain areas like the puffy cheeks which are a crucial feature for achieving my likeness! Didn't think of using light to my advantage like this and it will definitely benefit me when working on presentation of my model.

Overall I'm happy with the results and feel prepared to tackle character sculpt which is especially important as I received feedback saying its face is too generic. (Understandable as model is still not very defined in face area).

When deciding on colour palette, rendering style and the level of detail I used AI to produce a series of face iterations. It was helpful as it was very quick and saved me a lot of time by doing the trial and error for me ^^ I'll definitely use this method in the future again and research more into ways of incorporating AI into 3d workflow, just to make it more about the actual artistry.