>>3190444>Oh man. 2.5 hours flew by.Lol, a feeling I know all too well.
>I've been paying more attention to face shape, and Ive been trying to minimize facial imperfections while keeping the shape of the face realistic and accurate.Very impressive, I can tell you were thinking about the planes of her face and sculpted the shadows to follow the forms. Well done.
Whenever I'm trying to pull off something like this, the first thing I do is gather references. There are so many inspirational images on google that the search string "shadow portrait" pulls up. Awesome creativity. One thing I noticed with the best looking ones is the level of detail in the shadows. Notice a difference between your manipulation and the real deal? I do - actual shadows leave behind darkness with very low contrast. Sometimes even completely flat. I think it was a mistake to go with a contrast blending mode (soft light). The result almost looks like she was wearing goggles and watched a nuke go off, leaving her skin super dark. Instead of using a solid color set to soft light, I suggest using a curve with the highlight point pulled way down, and the shadow point pulled up a bit. So basically a very flat curve. This will eliminate the detail in the shadows properly. You can tweak the RGB curves to match the color of the actual shadows.
