Need some help with my very first digital painting... any tips much appreceated?

Hi everyone,


well just recently I started learning about digital painting... and now after some nice practice, I am currently working on my very first digital painting, which is of course very simple portrait of my self :) I guess everyone's first digital painting is their portrait :))





The stage I am currently in you can see here:


http://i227.photobucket.com/albums/dd112/nikolavejin/me.jpg





As you can see I did most of the painting, it's not any close to finish I think, and mostly it's still very rough in places as you can see, so I guess now I need to work on details for a while...





Now I would really appreciate if you could look at this painting and give me some tips on what's good and what is bad on painting, and what should I do with it next... in other language, I need some professional thoughts at this moment, and anything you say about it would be very helpful for me since I am very willing to fix any mistakes and make this looks good.





Tnx ;)Need some help with my very first digital painting... any tips much appreceated?
OK it's looking pretty good!





One area to pay attention to would be the neck where it joins the shirt collar. You don't want it to look as though the neck is sort of oozing over the collar. You'll need to do some shading there and also probably soften the shadow under the jaw; it's very hard and still looks a lot like a photograph with flash.





Overall there's a lot you can do with developing the range of tonal values (darks and lights) but it really depends on how much of a poster-painting effect you want. Other than that you could just look at your edges and smooth things out a little.





I looks like you've been enjoying yourself, congratulations!Need some help with my very first digital painting... any tips much appreceated?
very nice! The main change i would make is that the top lip is really thin. the other thing is the eyes are a bit lifeless and you don't seem to have any lashes. the shirt and neck could also use some work. over all its very nice though.
I find lots of ideas and tips from Photoshop Creative and Advanced Photoshop magazines.There are sister magazines for Corel Paint Shop Photo Pro and Corel Painter.There have been some tutorials on pencil and charcoal shading techniques that you might find interesting.Each mag has a web site,It depends which application you use but most of them can be tweaked to work like Photoshop as far as key board short cuts. Try working with Layers and Blending modes that way you can do some really subtle effects and over working isn't a problem as you can save at many stages and not risk spoiling anything.If you use a pen pad the shortcuts speed up working especially if you can use both hands at once! If you are drawing from scratch your first go is impressive,mine looked like a knitting pattern but that was in 1980s on an old BBC machine.