My first art entry into the Hive Creative Curation Contest. Progress included.

Hello Hive Community

Hope you having a great Sunday thus far. This is my first art entry into the Hive Creative Curation Contest created by Snibby the Cat. You can see the post by @isaria here:

https://hive.blog/contest/@isaria/the-hive-creative-curation-contest-brought-to-you-by-snibby-the-cat-25-hive-prize-plus-upvotes-25-palcoin-and-25-creativecoin

My submission is a portrait that I drew recently:

You will noticed the hive logo in the background, and the eye and hair color matching it. Hope that you like it.
Now I will be going through the steps of how I created the portrait.

What did I use to draw?

I use a drawing tablet - This is a Huion drawing tablet and I used Krita to create the digital art.

Step 1: Create a rough sketch

The sketch does not have to be fully accurate or detailed, it just need to capture the rough positions of the portrait. (i.e. roughly where the eyes, hair, nose and mouth are)

Step 2: Insert the base colors

This step is just to make sure that the base colors are included in the rough areas of the portrait.

Step 3: Insert more colors and more accurate positioning of colors

This step is where I start smoothing the colors, so that it looks more realistic. I also put in rough colors for the hair to indicate the lighting.

Step 4: Refining the colors

I started adding in the detail for the eye, the nose and the lips. Then I worked a bit on the detail for the hair.

Step 5: Refining the shadows

Shadows are now included to make the hair look more natural

Step 6: Adding a background

A portrait generally needs a background. Here I have included a dark background to bring out the portrait. However, the potrait seems like it is sinking in the background a bit. So last step is to enhance it