Speed Paint - Abd-al Malik

CS 3 / Intuos 3 / 1 hour / Ref used, no tracing or color sampling

Apparently this guy is a French Muslim rap singer. I just picked him because of the cool lighting in the photo, I'm not really familiar with his work, but if it's good let me know and I'll check it out. I'm really happy with how this came out even though the light on the left side of his face should really be more yellow, and his facial features are compressed a bit. Something I'm noticing as I do these is that I'm working with higher and higher opacity brushes and using less and less layers. Maybe it's a confidence thing? I actually think this would've been more successful if I'd used a separate layer for the foreground hand, I tried to emulate the depth-of-field blurriness with the regular brush and was only partially successful, I think. A separate layer and use of the airbrush would've been better.

Also go check out =Majoh , she should have her own Muslim gentleman speed paint up in a day or so!