Thread:Avnore/@comment-35502196-20180705055521/@comment-27924856-20180705195829

Oh. If you're asking for portraits, I'm afraid I can't help since I don't usually do portraits for other people, since the way I do custom hairstyles takes a few hours on top of face/body modifications, and it's generally really tiring unless I'm making them for myself or for a character of my own choice.

However, if you're looking for advice, I honestly can't see a lot wrong with Randall's portrait. It's mostly just a matter of clean-up. For his hair tufts, you could use the pen tool to draw over the edges (in the same color as his hair) to make them look less blurry. You could also draw over the part of his uniform where the collar meets his ponytail, since there's a white line where the background wasn't fully removed from the base. Better yet, have a .PSD file with a clean base on a different layer from the background, and use that PSD as a starting point for other portraits, if you haven't done so already.

I usually used paint tool sai for portraits, but it really doesn't matter what program as long as it has the tools/options that you need. In my case, I just needed copy/paste, magic wand, pen, airbrush, and blur, which are really common across almost every image editing program.

If it helps, on another layer, you could draw the outline of the hair that you want, lower the opacity, and place the actual hair pieces under it (using the outline as a reference), which is what I do.

Custom faces are also really useful in making portraits look unique. Personally, I find anime characters with eyes/faces like what I'm going for and use them as reference. Expression makes a big difference in expressing a character's personality, and it goes a long way in making the entire portrait look polished. The default face doesn't really tell much, but if you make a character's eyes narrower or bigger, point their eyebrows upward or downward, etc., even that makes the whole composition way more interesting.

Sorry if my advice doesn't really apply haha ;; I know you have a lot of OCs, so spending several hours on a single portrait might be more work than it's worth, but it's a really rewarding feeling to me. I just get burnt out really easily after it, though. :9 So I'm not really suitable for requests or anything like that. I hope I helped, though.