Henlo kiddos!

Ya boy is back, after having some mental struggles, the end of the school year, and not a lot of time to actually draw stuff.... (and being lazy to write tha chapters ieohgjr)

So here we go!

Recently I kinda rediscovered DeviantArt for myself, since I can just get all my art out there, say something to it, and have character sheets, story scenes and stuff like that all in one place... idk wattpad is quite similar to that, but I just like the way DA layouts everything :)
Also nobody ever reads/looks at my stuff, so it feels more like a private space that someone can stumble across, ya know?

Well, and since I was feeling a bit down, I found these beginner friendly tutorials where you can get some fancy badges from, so I had some fun and boosted my ego through following them:

Especially had fun with my attempt at the more grafic lighting there and I will DEFINETELY try to do this in my usual pieces as well :0

Like.. damn it's fun, easy and brings some extra contrast, athmosphere and movement in there :)

So that was all I made for easy tutorials that made me realise that I may even have some sort of art skill haha............

Then I also made a profile picture for a friend of mine!
Essentially he just wanted my stylised-realism type portraits of himself and payed me via discord nitro for a month xD

I kicked it off, by looking at the references he sent me (WHICH WAS HARD AF BC HE LITERALLY JUST LOOKS LIKE A DIFFERENT PERSON IN EVERY SINGLE ONE) and got down the basic facial proportions and placements of things:

After that I bunged some sort of colour in there, before sketching in the more detailed placements of things, as well as where I plan my light- and shadow-planes to go, since those are the most important element of the piece.

Tbh I can only always laugh at these stages and when I sent him the WIP he 100% was questioning whether or not I was the right person to commission for this xDD

Finally having all the basics down, I continued to add the first shadows and highlights, to get the shapes in there, also getting a nice, airbrushes blush to give him some life, that won't be obvious later on.

After the basic shadows were done, I added in the eyes and eyebrows (since... DANG that thing looked creepy without those) and could continue to work on the thing without those guides.

Also added his pimples on the nose....... which he really wasn't happy about, but I had to, BC HIS SKIN IS SO DARN SMOOTH OTHERWISE AND I NEED SOME SORT OF TEXTURE IN THERE, FOR HIM NOT TO LOOK LIKE A FUKKIN ROBOT.

I then continued to work on the details, especially in terms of lighting and dimension... also added the remaints of what could eventually be a beard in a few years.... bc texture.... he wasn't happy bout that either, but it looked good, so he let me keep em :)

Also finally shaded his shirt, because I desperately didn't wanna work on this chaos on his head.

Yeah at this point he was like "Just get the hair over and done with, you're running out of things to do and I don't wanna be bald for eternity" so I.... left it for the day, and returned the next day for his chaotic hair.

So the hair was less of a struggle than I thought, but it still was a pain lmao

the sides were short which was 0 problems for me, but the top? That just went in all directions. I essentially just tried my best to get that swoop on the right, the hairs hanging into the forehead on the left, and the general hairs standing out everywhere else.

Man... getting the silhouette down was indeed hard, but shading really saved it!

Talking about shading... it was more difficult than i thought to make the three lengths really stand out from one another, and also catch his haircolour.

The haircolour was indeed hella interesting, since it's a brown-ish blonde, with this weird brown spot in the middle of this hair, with it getting more blonde-brown on the sides.

So I sent him this, he critiqued a bit to get the likeness just right.

He also asked if I could get him a bit happier, since he didn't realise the serious look beforehand, soo... I exported the png, liquified some stuff around, trying to keep it still looking natural!

I then continued with my usual gradients, a white border and a texture-overlay since his face still looked wayyyy too smooth.

So yeah.. that was that.....

two small sketches and a realistic-ish commission :)
Hope ya liked it, even though it all was insanely different to my usual stuff! I'll try to get more chapters out over the week, in order to catch up with my current state of the drawings >w<

>>cuddles, patts and gives a cookie<<