baneofjustin

If you haven't read Slice Quest or Bones Quest by DemBones, I highly recommend it. You can read both here. Below are a few characters present in the quest in my style.

Ayla and Terra

Mina and Darren Hauser

Cammy (with extra rendering)

Recently, I've been having a lot of fun figuring out how to get a painted face look with my style. I've always been a bit uncomfortable moving past flat fill coloring, and I've never been the proudest of my shading (I seem to pillow shade too often). But every so often I'll try it out, like last night.

My friends were playing Arkham Asylum in a call, and after joining and talking a lot about Batman, I decided to draw my own Bruce Wayne. I wanted to keep the design somewhat classic and referenced a lot of Batman designs from the '70's.

I started drawing and got two handsome Batmen. Next, I wanted to add color. I simply filled the face in with a skin tone, but I really wasn't satisfied with it. Bruce Wayne has a structured face, so I decided to bottle up the anxieties that usually come as a result of attempting to paint and gave it my best shot.

I was very happy with my results, but I had to fix a few issues. One, the lighting. The lighting on Bruce is different from the one on Batman's cowl, and the lighting on Batman's face doesn't match his cowl. Two, Bruce's cheek didn't look raised and seemed strange to me. I experimented with smirking on one side of my face in the bathroom mirror, and noticed that my cheek moved more out that up. I also wanted to make a cool Batman logo which led me to make a Wayne Enterprises logo.

Cool! I went to sleep after this.

Then I woke up, and I kept thinking about Bruce's full face and wondered what it would look like with softer blending. I've tried to add some airbrushing to my artwork but never really attempted blending. I first added a warm rosy overlay and gave the tone curve an S shape to bump up the contrast.

FireAlpaca doesn't really have the blending capabilities that Procreate and CSP do, but I made do with a mix of the Airbrush, Blur, and Mix brushes.

Whipped this up before work and am pretty happy with what I've learned throughout the process.