this is a fantasy portrait for a client. what he wanted was a portrait that doesn't give away to much for the viewers, allowing them to project somewhat, their image of what the character should look like, thus the heavy shadows. I could have used reference but i opted not to so I could maintain the illustrative qualities, I also just in general don't like using refs when dealing with portrait work because its very easy to just fall into "copy" mode. anyway I had a lot of fun with it, to get all the fine rendering of the dark image I painted it in a much lighter version and later lowered the levels to get the darkness I was aiming for. I hope you like it, I may be doing a series of these for the clients remaining characters but we'll see thanks for viewing and I'd love to hear your comments!