I lost a friend of mine, Tara Krehbiel, to cancer last year. You may remember Tara from her work she did with me on the Artist Series Calendar. She was a fantastic art friend with a lot of shared interests as me.

This year I decided to participate in both of Paintable’s One Week Portrait challenges. The purpose of the challenge is to create your best portrait yet. Instructor David breaks up the challenge across 5 days, which allows you to create your very best work while putting in as little or as much time as you want.

While I’m pretty well versed in digital drawing, seeing the videos was a great refresher and anyone who draws can always do with a bit of practice studying. Back in April, I created the first one, seen on the left, of model Hamid Fadaei. I chose the reference photo for its particular contrast, fun lighting, colors, textures, and of course… The smoke.

The second reference image I chose, by photographer Anna Danilova, was pretty much the opposite of the first. It was using really subtle colors and shades, most of it was obscured, and because there’s only a relatively low quality resolution copy of this image on the web (and I cropped it in on the face), I had to make up some textures and other pixel data.

Overall fun to do, a nice practice exercise, and something to keep my mind occupied while the world is currently exploding. Hoping to have some new illustrations soon. Thanks for reading. 🙂

It’s a tiny bit early, but I wanted to make sure that everyone got a nice holiday greeting (or two) from me this year, so I’ve decided to attach my yearly in review to this blog post as well.