Hey guys! This is a portrait of Nasrin, one of the side characters from Meridian. I had a lot of fun working on this, especially since I needed a break from the Tichu cards my dad wants me to draw (they're all stylized animals, which is tougher for me). Anyway, here's the pic:

If you wanna know more about how I drew this one, keep scrolling!

1 - of course I realized after the fact that I never took a screenshot of the sketch so you'll have to make do with the sketch + some flat color + the eyeball. I always start coloring with the eyeball first.

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2 - I started blocking out the hair and adding some shading on the face. The nose took forever.

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3 - Some more details and shading, specifically the neck and lips.

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4 - This is where i started detailing the hair. Usually I start with a large brush to block out the shadows and then I go back with a lighter color to add small highlights

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5 - Playing with the background. Most of it is just flat color that I blurred out.

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6 - Finally finished all the hair details. Added some more stuff to the background and foreground, plus I started working on the back lighting. Also good news: she's wearing clothes now.

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7 - Here's some finishing details. I drew the ear (finally), added a rough texture, darkened the pic a little bit, adjusted her chin. I also added more glowy highlights to the hair.

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8 - I moved to GIMP at this point (I do most of the painting in Procreate and then finish everything in GIMP). Here the only big change I wanted to do was fix up the eye shape a little and crop the image a bit smaller.