Dwarf Portraits

[Weeksy]

having uniform-thickness (and fairly thin at that) chest hair might improve the appearance a bit. I'm put off by the extra-thick hairs, they look a bit like claws or fingernails.

[thespaceinvader]

New forum is taking some getting used to, but i kinda like it.

Had this waiting for a couple of days - finished berzerker. More linework fiddles to the face, tattoo etc as kitty suggested, followed by shading. Also added some (thankfully, reasonable-looking) knotwork engraving to the axe.

[Mathijs]

I'd say this portrait looks perfect!

mat

[kitty]

hey - he is looking even better now! i particularly love his axe! the knotwork added a lot to it!
i can't put my finger onto it - but something bothers me about his skin's shading. it's somehow tot bright or glossy...

and on a side note: i think scars would have been fitting for somebody with his lifestyle

[thespaceinvader]

It's possible the highlights are a little too close to white. i was toying with making him very tanned, but it doesn't really jive with the dwarves living mostly underground. A little darker/browner would probably be good, though.

Scars might be a nice addition, too. I will see about adding some.

[irrevenant]

The line between his far pectoral and his right arm is perfectly straight. To me that looks a bit unnatural and makes his chest look flat - I would expect a bit of a curve.

[edit] The haft of the axe could also be 'roughed up' a bit. At the moment it looks like plastic rather than wood.

eg.

[thespaceinvader]

I'm not quite sure about the pec - that would be about right if his arm was down and his pec was tensed, but as far as i can work out, my line is basically right for the pec being stretched as it would be in that position. Believe me, it took me a lot of working out =P It might do with being a little further out from the rest of his torso, though. I'll look into it.

You're definitely right about the axe haft, though. I completely forgot to include grain.

[Mathijs]

Hm yeah and his lower hand needs a bit more shading around the heft too, now it looks a bit like a lego-hand...

darn
not perfect yet

[thespaceinvader]

Good point - i added a shadow from the blade on his top hand, but forgot to include a shadow from the haft on the bottom one. It goes on the list.

[irrevenant]

IMO, the pec would be contracted (and thus bulgy) with his arm pointed forward like that. Plus it just looks right to me. I won't argue the case though ('cos I just did. ).

Also, now that I look at it again, the nearest arm looks 2-dimensional (ie. flat). it could probably just use shading (rather than reshaping) though.

[kitty]

i agree that the front arm is a bit on the flat side - but since you got already good advice on how to fix that, i'll cling to the skin colour:

i don't think it's too white (perhaps a bit) but much to yellow. skin isn't as saturated as we tend to think of it most of the time. (have you ever tried to mix a decent skincolour with "real" paint? you have to avoid orange like hell and even yellow is easily too much)
i would desaturate the whole skin, give the shadows a colour (not just a darker version of your basecolour, but a complementary one like a grey-ish green/blue).
and for the face a rule of thumb is that the forhead is rather yellowish, nose and eyes reddish and the chin is bluer (at least on men)...


(i didn't apply those rules on my elves, because i wanted their skin to be luminous and reflecting, but dwarves should be more earthy imho)

[thespaceinvader]

Thanks =)

I'll have a mess with it, see what happens. It's little details liek this that will really improve this, i hope.

[Jodwin]

Is it just me or does his left hand have six fingers?

[thespaceinvader]

Nope - there's a bulge at the bottom where the heel of the palm is flattened out by the axe haft inside which could be mistaken for a finger, but it's not =)

[thespaceinvader]

Sorry for long silence. Horrible week at work led to me being tired and utterly uninspired.

'zerker edits - minor linework fiddles - smaller eyes and bigger left pec - plus attempted to enact kitty's suggestions regarding shading colour on the face, with limited success - my various attempts during the process have given him alternate clown makeup and yellowface (an old term for people in 'asian/chinese' makeup) looks. I suspect the methodology of how I shade and highlight my work may be at fault here (flats on the bottom layer, shadng on the next layer up, highlights next). Similarly, I attempted to shade the whole skin area with a bluish green as suggested and it just looked strange. Possibly my shading layer is too opaque.

Not really sure how to improve this any further.

Next will be some further work improving the shading and detailing on the Gryphon Rider.

EDIT: said edits to the Gryphon Rider. Probably not far-reaching enough, I fear.

Also, a basic sketch of a pose for the Lord. I wanted him to look noble, old and quite benevolent, so i went with something fairly stationary. I'll attempt to deepen his chest, improve the beard (i have a nice one in mind, inspired from a dwarf image i've seen elsewhere) and make the cloak a little more logical at inking.