Capturing the likeness - JUN 2022

A while ago when I was in Taiwan, I decided to do some doodles with traditional pen ink. I have been able to capture the likeness of people before in portraits, though I admit it has been hit or miss.

Around this time I found out that Henry Cavill was a fan of Warhammer 40K, so I decided to try draw him as the God Emperor of mankind. (Yes that is also my attempt at drawing Stan Prokopenko as a badass cowboy on the right).

During my attempt I also tried to draw Henry with a hairstyle of the God Emperor in the reference paintings. It was hit and miss, with the hairstyle of the God Emperor, the portrait did not look like Henry at all. At the time I wasn't sure if the new hairstyle was throwing me off or just my general lack of consistency in capturing the likeness of the person I was trying to draw.

This month I decided to test my understanding of capturing someone's likeness more consistently by working digitally. This way I could try copy a reference photo closely enough to capture the likeness. Then after I have the likeness of the person, I could try to change their hairstyle to something else. The logic is that people change their hairstyle all the time, but still look like the same person.

I did two iterations of trying to capture Henry's likeness with digital art. In my first iteration I felt like the difference was too big. The portrait I made to the left of the reference photo does not really look like Henry Cavil at all, to me anyway. After taking a break for a few days, I went back to compare my painting to the reference in more detail. This included copying my painting, resizing it, and overlaying it on the reference photo. That way I could see the differences I was struggling to notice. I saw many not so big differences (not so big to me at least) that was contributing to me not being able to capture Henry's likeness. I'm still working on the second iteration, but after the changes I noted and made, I feel like the painting is starting to look much more like Henry, even if I haven't painted his eyes in yet.