I haven't done portraits in a while - so I started painting up some Star Wars characters. After three I was pretty much done, but I certainly learned a lot doing it. It was a little different than usual because the references I used were from the films. Because they were filmed in the late 70's - early 80's, a lot of the information in the pictures wasn't very clear. The colors were a little funky too for the same reason. Back then their cameras shot in a much lower resolution, so to get things to show up clearly I'm sure they had to use a bunch of makeup and heavy lighting. The challenge was fun though, and I think I got much better at blending skin tones / textures, and painting pretty much every facial feature. I also learned to improvise texture in clothing and fabric by doing these. I'd like to do more, but I need to switch over to drawing things from my head (tired of looking so closely at references).
