This was a challenge I decided to give myself in April 2023! I felt I needed more practice with making portraits look closer to their references. So I took one day and asked on my social media if any of my followers would like to get a free portrait for a challenge/project I was doing. Then I collected six references who all had different facial structures, figured out how I wanted to compose the six heads together on one piece of paper within a sketchbook and started! They all look like a really cool totem together, and I feel I conveyed my cartoony colourful version of their portraits well! I have continued facial studies such as this since, but this was the first time I tasked myself with such a big project that I was unfamiliar with at the time. I used pencil for a raw sketch for most, then I gradually started adding watercolor pencils starting from the lightest colour and working my way darker. The last step is adding white acrylic highlights and touching anything else up with acrylic paint that needs it. I really love how this traditional piece came out, it also helped me get more comfortable with watercolor pencils, a new medium to me at the time that I did this challenge!

I love creating portraits traditionally, I feel it brings so much more life to the painting when you can see all the little scribbles and brushstrokes.