COMMISSION — ‘The Reverend’.

For this commission I was given a screenshot of the client’s game avatar— an older clergyman for a fictional church and tasked with producing a bust icon of him. Senior and greying, I had a lot of fun giving him all the signposts of aging; the wrinkles, crows feet and greying hair and moustache. I also gave him a 5 o’clock shadow for his skin thinning with age, and a few stray hairs as a nod to his eyesight getting worse with age.

Out of my most recent work, I am most pleased with this piece and how I shaded and rendered the skin. I am always learning and improving with my art and how I cel-shade, but I am very proud of how I built up the depths of shadows to show different planes of the face. I have found shading and highlighting light coloured hair difficult in the past too, but here I worked from darkest to light, building up definition with strands and highlights throughout.