Have to establish the base color before you go any further! Unfortunately for me I can't ever seem to get any closer than the 10% margin on HSV without color picking.

Steps: sketch. Make sure you have it pretty much right. Spend an hour on it if you are not familiar with drawing or a particular pose. It will save you 5 more hours down the road. Practice sketching in your spare time. It is the foundation for everything else.

Block it in. Get the rough colors in. DON'T worry about the details. If you stand back ten feet and don't see a difference between your painting and the photo, then you're done.

Refine. Was it green enough? Spend a lot of time here and make sure you have the colors and saturation right. If you screw it up here, you'll have a really hard time to fix anything after you fleshed out all the details.

Detail. Repeat the steps above but on a smaller scale. Do them for all the parts, lips, nose, eyes, hand, etc.

Adjust. Play around with all the Image > Adjustment tools in photoshop and maximize the appeal of the image. Make sure it has good contrast and color or whatever.


No that's not me punching him.