TUTORIAL // making your digital portraits more interesting

It’s time for this month’s tutorial! In my list of suggestions I got from patrons, one of them was how to make a drawing less boring - or alternatively, what I do to make sure that my drawings are eye-catching and exciting to look at. I thought this was a really interesting topic to tackle, because it’s something that I have actively been trying to tackle lately! I often find halfway through the process that the image is falling flat, especially for social media where it needs to stand out against so much other artwork. 

Although it has a lot of similarities to other tutorials about finalizing character portraits, this one is intended specifically as a list of techniques and approaches that you can try to make your drawing look more eye-catching and exciting. Feel free to pick and choose what works for your own process from it!

Here's the final artwork that was created during the demo:

This video covers:

• What defines a ‘boring’ image for me (disclaimer - this is subjective!)
• Which aspects I focus on when I try to make an image look more interesting
• A demonstration of techniques that help me achieve this
• Suggestions for how to make your artwork more interesting from the outset

I use a few different brushes in the process. They are:

• The MaCaLabs HB pencil brush to sketch and create linework
• The hard round brush from my own set to paint and ‘sculpt’ the colors
• The Sharp Edge brush from Wes Gardner’s 2020 brush pack for some texture
• The ‘rough’ brush from Cateille's (formerly Viorie) brush set to create texture and add finer detail towards the end.

As always, there's no need to use these specific brushes! You can use free or default brushes to get similar effects. 

This tutorial has a lot of overlaps with other tutorials because it is about drawing and finalizing a character portrait. Here are some other tutorials that might be helpful if you want to learn more about this overall process:

• Constructing a pose - this one runs you through the shapes that I use to construct a pose and how I try to create visual rythm by using different angles and positioning of the limbs.
• Choosing colors - this one explains what I’m thinking and which tools I use to pick a color scheme. It explains more about color modification tools and things like changing the color of the linework.
• Finalizing a painting without over-rendering - this one talks about how I add detail to a painting in a way that doesn’t lead to an overly smooth end result.

I hope you enjoy this one! If you have any ideas for a future tutorial, please feel free to suggest them. I put all of your suggestions in a list and go through it every time I make a tutorial, so they are very helpful to me! Have a great weekend everyone ❤

By the way, the subtitled version is coming up in a minute! And if you have any trouble watching this video, please check out this post, which has a list of external links to all of the tutorials which you can view on vimeo.