Hello, my name is Pavel, I work as a concept artist and illustrator in the game industry. I'm going to demonstrate the painting process of a character portrait. For the painting, I will be using Coral Painter Essential 7 as a tool. The character I want to depict is a hero of the Slavic folk tales and is called the Mistress of the Copper Mountain. She is a spirit of the Eural Mountains, a protector of underground reaches and the patroness of miners. Her dress is made of copper, malachite and small lizards are her servants. For the reference and inspiration, I have selected a few images that I have composed into a single file. I keep it opened beside my painting so that I could see all images at once. As you can see, I have started with a line sketch. The purpose of this sketch is to define the main idea to outline basic shapes and proportions. For this I am going to use basic crayon. It has a good line variation and responds to paper grain, which I like a lot. I keep the line drawing on a separate layer so that later I could paint underneath it. At this stage I am not going to deepen to details. It is enough just to capture her general impression. Most of the delicate work I am going to do when I will be painting with color. I am experimenting with her headdress design. I want it to be roughly based on Russian so-called kakoshnik, but I don't want to replicate it, just give it some ethnic flavor. For this headdress varying, I am trying a more irregular, flowing pattern. Again, details are not important at this stage. What matters is the variation of scale and size. I am trying to combine dense clusters of details and sparse areas to create rhythms that would be interesting to look at. I decided to move on with the last variant of her headdress design, the one that had almost circular shape. This is the next step I feel the background with color that would define the overall palette and lightness of the image. Then I create a new layer underneath the line art and start painting basic volumes. I want to keep your headdress and face silhouettes easy to read and at the same time bringing some color vibrance. A good brush for adding color vibrance is the one that can pick up the color from the mixer pad. A good example is the clumpy brush that I am using at the moment. The ability to mix colors on a mixer pad is one of my favorite features in Painter. When you pick up a paint from the mixer pad, each bristle of the brush is painted slightly differently. That naturally brings more subtlety and variance to your brushwork. If you had some experience with traditional medium, then I am sure you will also enjoy this feature. For most of the image area, I try to keep saturation moderate, leaving brighter and saturated colors for accents. While painting, I keep thinking about what areas should attract viewer's attention first. This is what I would call an image hierarchy. In our case, her face should pop out first, and the details of her headdress is a secondary. I move on to the details once I am happy with the overall look of the sketch. I merge line art and painting layers, but still keep background separate. Now I will have a little focus on her face as it is the most important area of the image. A good habit is to ask yourself from time to time, what is the most important detail I should work on next? This becomes especially critical when you have time constraints. Even when you run out of time, you will still have an image that conveys your idea. I use a variety of brushes to paint your face, but my favorite one is the low deflector knife. Despite its name, it is very flexible and provides great control over the brushstroke, and it can be used even for very small details. I do not try to smooth out all the brushstrokes, but rather I put them side by side, like mosaic. This gives a more pure and vibrant color. When painting a portrait, there are certain areas that require special attention. First, I would mention a face silhouette, and how edge of that silhouette changes along its way. Using this edge smoother or sharper will affect the rid of the face form. She is definitely a beautiful woman, a bit self-willed and capricious. I have shifted her chin because it seemed to me a bit off the place. A huge advantage of the digital medium is that you can easily move and adjust areas that has already been painted without sacrificing details. When painting details, it is important to see how they come together in context of the whole image. So I zoom in and out often to control that. At this point, I am satisfied with how her face comes out. I think I have managed to show her personality, and now I can move on to her headdress. That doesn't mean that I want to come back to adjust her face, but for now, it is more important to push through the other areas of the image. The headdress on her forehead is supposed to be made of precious stones. I am trying to be careful adding details there, because I think the image is already quite noisy, and I need to avoid extra clutter. For a while, I will keep these details on a separate layer, so that if I change my mind, I could remove them. The nature has much more imagination than I have. So for her headdress texture, I am referring to images of the Mellikite Venerle, which is so beautiful and intricate. I could continue with this image further, and there is no clear finish line when you can say I am done, but I think I have got the essence of this character, and I can stop for now. I hope you found this video demonstration useful, and learned something new from it. Thank you for watching, and goodbye!