Star Wars Portraits - Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia

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).

Daddy's Home

Everybody's got a soft spot - even nasty looking dwarves!  This started out as just a portrait of an old wrinkly guy, and it kept changing to what it is now.  I liked the idea of juxtaposing a huge burly man with a little baby.  Judging by the last several pictures I've done (with the exception of a couple), I guess I like using lots of blues and oranges.  Oh well!  I'm happy with the result, let me know what you guys think.

PS CS5
Wacom Bamboo tablet

The King

This is another movie still exercise - I thought a certain Lord of the Rings shot of Aragorn was pretty cool, so I painted it. It was much more time consuming than I originally thought it would be. I started out thinking I wasn't going to put in much detail, but then I got into it! I learned a lot about picking the right colors, texture, etc.  Getting the likeness 100% is always a big challenge, but I think this one turned out nicely.