Mick Foley

27th of February 2012, Luke and I were going to Mick Foley's stand up show in Cardiff, which I thought was pretty awesome. Never been at a stand up show before, and the first one being Mick Foley's - well, that's even more awesome. And when Luke told me there'd be a meet and greet afterwards, well... I HAD to draw a portrait of him and try to get it signed - to add to my collection of signed celebrity photos :)
 And here it is, the signed one:

"To Connie. (and I believe it says): Wow this is great! *signature*"
:)
Reference photo for this drawing is taken from a still from his DVD "Hard knocks & Cheap pops" (try saying that 5 times fast).
SO, my work in progress - which is the main reason why I have this blog. To show my work in progress of ... well, all my art stuff.

The sketch. Took me about 20 min. I'm always pretty thorough with my sketches, making sure that everything is where it's suppose to be. Eyes, mouth, eyebrows - in this case; the lines of the mask, etc. It makes it easier to do the drawing itself.
I can't make myself draw without using a grid to help myself get everything in the right place. It makes it so much easier.

About 1 hour in. I started out with the mask in this drawing - I thought it'd be easier to get started that way. Pretty fun to do, actually. What makes a portrait hard to do is to get all the lines and textures in the face right - in this case I didn't have to worry about that, which was great! Hehe :)

Now.. I didn't save the sketch in this one, which I regret. But oh well..
Started out on the face, and I'm a bit confused seing that I've written down "2hours 45 min in" on this one, and I can't imagine it took me 1h45m to just draw some of the face and the eyes... Then again, I believe I've done a few adjustments on the mask as well. I'm pretty sure I'd been working on the whole piece for about 2,5 hours or so.

About 3,5 hours in. I've worked a bit more on the face, including the facial hair and mouth. By this point I was real happy that this was just a still photo from a dvd - meaning the quality of the reference picture wasn't that good - so there was only so much I could do with the detail in my drawing. The beard would be a pain to work with if the picture was in higher quality...
And then...there was the hair..

The hair...I'm glad I saved for last, cause I almost gave up at this point, after working about an hour on it and not even being half way through.. Been working on the whole piece for about 4,5 hours at this point, and though I could see the finish line..I felt like I was crawling there. The hair took ages, BUT... I'm happy with the way it turned out.
Using mostly a very thin..the thinnest brush I could find, for the more messy effect standing out in the light and the background, and then thicker brushes to get the shading effects.
At the end of it all, since the hair was
quite blurred in the original reference photo, I made sure I had one whole layer for the hair itself -and then used a blur effect to make the hair blurry enough so I couldn't see all the little.. uneven errors I'd done.

Finishing off the whole picture with correcting the left (his right) eye, and finishing the neck-part... I ended up being a lot more satisfied with the drawing than what I thought I'd be. And of course, I'm a lot more satisfied with it now that it's been signed.
All in all it took me about 5,5 hours to finish. I think. One of my quicker drawings, I guess :)
Done with Photoshop CS5 (as always. Of course).

Another drawing coming up soon. :)

- Connie