Bit of backstory:

I've been in a a fair amount of a slump in my drawing activities lately. After couple of attempts doing Drawpile sessions in someone's Discord channel as well as some personal talks with a friend of mine about how to improve certain aspects of drawing, I ended up picking up some value practices. Prior to this image I had ended up doing four images in total where I only use a hard brush and blend the values and tones together to create the necessary details in.

Needless to say, it is kind of fun as it's merely filling in the details. It has it's challenges, don't get me wrong, but in general, I kind of like the way how you start with a huge design and then slowly but surely add more values and details, going from big broad approaches down to tiny details, as if squeezing it all in.

Only today I ended up taking what I like to consider a huge leap: after watching a video done by "Paint Coach" about how to make paintings look less cartoony, I had a personal "Heureka!" -moment and just HAD to try that same approach but on a different character on a different image. I wanted to do the smirking smile that Jamie Foxx as Django does in the movie "Django Unchained", so I picked up the screenshot and..... well, it did provide one problem: the shot itself is way darker than expected, so most details and values were difficult to be made out.

Still, I tried my best. And I feel like had I been able to squeeze just a bit more detail in with the blending, the picture and it's overall quality would be even better. But for what it's worth, I think this image is by far one of my best works overall on a different medium and with a different approach entirely and it sparked some great joy in me - therefor deserving it's own personal upload into my gallery.


Here's a hoping that I can implement or play around with these kinds of things value paintings on non-human characters and even without using refs at some point.