PAINT PORTRAITS WITH URBAN STYLE

Bring a touch of street chic to your artwork as Alvaro Escobar explains his process for creating expressive, stylised portraits

- Alvaro Escobar

Welcome to my digital portrait workshop! In this tutorial, I’ll guide you along the process I follow for creating a detailed and expressive portrait using a variety of digital brushes and techniques. Whether you’re a freshfaced beginner just getting started or an experienced artist out to refine your skills, this workshop will offer valuable insight and practical steps to give your work a lift.

We’ll start off with the basics of composition and proportions using a hard airbrush for quick and gestural layout. This foundational step helps in establishing the overall structure of your portrait. From there, we’ll refine the sketch with a precise brush, considering major shadow shapes and highlights to add depth and dimension.

Throughout the workflow, we’ll also make use of tricks like canvas flipping and the Selection tool to maintain symmetry and focus on specific areas. By saving and loading selections, we can ensure an efficient process and precise detailing.

We’ll explore layering techniques to build up shadows, highlights and midtones, gradually transitioning to colour adjustments for a warm, lifelike appearance. Texture plays a key role, so we’ll employ various brushes to add intricate details and smooth finishes too.

Incorporating elements like hatching and graffiti enhances the portrait’s character and style. Finally, we’ll wrap things up with a layer of solid white fill in the Multiply blend mode and add noise for a cohesive, polished look.

1 Create a basic idea

Start out with the Hard Brush Airbrush to quickly lay out the composition and proportions for your piece. This first step is meant to be quick and gestural, so don’t get too hung up on the details here.