2D Head Studies01

These are a long time in the making. Back in 2020, while working on Wayfinder, Joe Mad (my boss) did some loose head sketches. For fun, I had made a quick painting pass over them and then . . . they sat on my hard drive for the past 5 years. I've started getting back into digital painting, so I thought I would finally bring these to completion!
Back then, I pretty much just used a hard square brush for everything and relied on my game art texture painting techniques. Doing this, I found that I had a tendency to make my paintings pretty flat. Texture flats for a character model tend to not have a lot of directional lighting baked in. With this new pass I really wanted to push the lighting and I also wanted to play with textured brushes.
As with a lot of people, I was majorly inspired by the work of Arcane and studied the work of Victor Maury! Amazing artist!
https://www.victormaury.com/