Halloween contest prize winner

This year's End of Season Halloween party digital caricature winner was Thomas Akridge from woodshop.  Yeah, it's far more of a portrait than a digital caricature but I do have my reasons for that.  It's the first time I've sat down and did any sort of portrait/caricature painting in a little bit of time so I decided that I was going to gradually get myself back into doing it.  With all the live work and such I've been busy with as of late I knew that it would be all too easy to end up doing a caricature that's too by-the-numbers if I approached it the wrong way.  That, and there's a pretty high chance that I'll be drawing a few portraits here and there during my stay in Christmas Town so the last thing I need is to be thinking too caricaturey all the time as that won't do anything but get me in trouble.  

That said, there were a couple fairly significant hurdles to overcome with this piece.

1. I changed the angle of the head tilt some from the photo. This obviously was going to provide it's own set of challenges that you normally wouldn't have to worry about if you were just straight referencing the photo and using plumb lines and such, but doing it this way meant I had to use my brain to piece the puzzle together a bit more which is why I went this route instead. I probably wouldn't do this normally for a potential paying client for the sake of keeping things as sane as possible, but for my purposes it tends to keep the rust out and the mind working like it should for this kind of stuff.

2. This digital wasn't done in Painter on a wacom, it was done on the Nintendo 3DS with the upgraded Art Academy: Lessons For Everyone, made specifically for it.  I decided to do it this way for two reasons, to force myself to work without the assistance of sliders and undos, and to see just how much I could get out of the new version as opposed to the older ones on the DS. To be quite honest with you, I'm actually very impressed with it.  It's paints look a lot better than it did on the original Art Academys for the DS, and there's quite a few more options you have at your disposal too. However, the obviously smaller screen and lack of pressure sensitivity did make this a bit more difficult to work on.  As a result the painting itself is a bit looser than what I'd normally do for this sort of thing, and there's certain things that I know could've been straightened out a lot easier if I was doing this in painter as well.

Overall though I do like the end result of it.  It was a challenge and it still looks good in the end so on that note I'm satisfied with it.  Admittedly though, I had to make a conscious decision to actually stop working on this before I screwed something up on it.  Remember, NO undos.