FULL VIEW, DAMN IT! lol

EDIT: woops! Noticed a silly mispelling on the watermark on the left...

About 5 hours in photoshop; used a crappy cell-phone photo of myself as reference. Damn, I've gotten good!

Making good use of the custom brushes, and some techniques I recently created/discovered. Mostly, I VERY heavily abused a textured smudge tool on this. I'd make blotches of color and drag them ontop of each other to make shapes, so I didn't need lines. Then I'd use the blur tool on those areas, and smudge again, and blur... you get the idea. Only exception was around the eyes/nose.

Also, I discovered that purple and green are necessities for making a realistic portrait... a dark gray-ish green in the deep shadows near the outskirts of the skin (around the collar and hair/eyebrows), and a slighlty purplish coloration in deep shadows that are not at the edges of the skin (ear, nose, eyes).

For those that know me, but haven't seen me in a while... yes, that's a beard and mustache. And the fuzz in the back is my fluffy ponytail.... I'm growing it out until it's long enough to make some decent dreadlocks with