At this stage I focus my attention on his fancy toga. I decided that the bare sketch I had done just wouldn't do, so I created a series of stripy lines for folds using a large paintbrush. From this point I do a lot of painting over the old image. (Oh, and if I were more patient, I would use a smaller brush for details such as these! Less work later :P)

If you want to create clothing texture, lower the density of your brush while you paint, so that your lines will retain a certain amount of speckles. The same applies for when smudging skin or textures, use a brush with low density so that artefacts remain. It is the impurities that make an image look more realistic and less "computery" or "plasticy."



Here I am using a large smudge brush with low density to run along the seams between each line, in order to create folds! I have also painted a few speckly lines using an airbrush with an even lower density, and layered it in. I have also decided that I don't like his halo or his wings anymore!



On drapery, once I have done the previous steps, I use a fine, dense smudge brush to smudge up shadows in the folds in order to add more details. If at any stage I feel what I have done is too "smudgey" or obviously smudged, I use a soften brush at the peripheries of whatever lines I am creating to take the edge of the smudginess.



Now it is time to move on.

Retouching Drawings Part 4