I decided to try something new on autodesk sketchbook. It's something I do not see a lot of great at digital painters do so I thought it'd be nice if I tried - It was to make a digital painting Using only less than 6 layers for a whole work.

On a normal day, I'd use almost fifteen layers, even my mentor uses up to twenty layers. I just wanted this to be a bit closer to traditional drawing which I'm very familiar with.

My model for the days practise is Rihanna... Wild wild wild thoughts. Haha.
Why not draw her? She's my musical crush and I love the strength and power in her voice.

PROCESSES

I began by outlining the face out and duplicating the outline before filling the outline with the foundational colour, I moved to the top layer and added the eyebrows.

I then proceed to adding the shadows on the second layer with my soft airbrush with a deeper shade of brown that has been a bit saturated towards reddening. This is always my most enjoyable time. I also love adding shades o traditional drawings so I just shaded away. It wasn't looking so goot at first but that's always how shading goes

I was able to completely shade the whole face, neck and the upper chest then added the really dark shades using the hard airbrush and colour set on black.... And it popped. I also went over to the eye lashes and eye brows and added the necessary touches with my pencil set at size 1.4.... it popped out. I then proceed to shading out the eyes and darkening the necessary places.

I then decide to create a new layer and went all out with blace on the hair switching between the soft and hard airbrushes and then used the same pencil at size 1.4 and colour set to lighter brown to add the strands before going over the edges to soften it up with the soft airbrush with very low opacity. I was already grinning here.

I then went over the painting with a very much lighter shade of brown and used it for the highlights and again.. It came out even finer.

This is the final result.

What do you think guys

I exported it to PicArt and did the necessary croppings