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Originally Posted by Alexandra Tyng
Beautiful, Terri! His skin looks so real, and I like the way you painted his glasses...
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Hi Alex--
Since glasses can be tricky (at least for me!) to paint, thought it might be helpful to share how they came to be painted this way...
At the first reference photo session, I took photos with & without glasses. Especially since the glasses made his eyes appear much smaller than they actually are, my intent was to paint how his face looks without the glasses, but add the glasses in over his face. (He always wears them).So I took shots of him with the glasses on and his face/head in various orientations.
Luckily we managed to get a nice shot of his face w/out glasses (top left) AND a shot in a very similar position with the glasses on (bottom left). So I cropped out the glasses and their shadow and added them as a layer (in paint shop pro) over is face (bottom right)... even though the two original photos look similar, when you layer them like this, it's obvious that the glasses photo shadows (at least) are much too dark for the photo of his face, AND that the glasses obscure the true shape/size of his eyes.
So final step in getting a workable reference was to cut out the eyes from the glasses 'layer' so that we could see his real eyes. AND since I wanted the glasses to be there but not attract a lot of attention, I also reduced the 'opacity' of the glasses layer to 50%, softening both the glasses and their shadow. The final altered reference is at the top right below -- Note that in the painting I wound up softening that shadow from the glasses even more.