I decided to sit back and look at what can be made with the smudge tool on autodesk and what shouldn't be smudged but instead recreated... After a few days, I created this digital painting which I just completed today.
ADOBE AUTODESK SKETCHBOOK PRO
DURATION : 9HRS
LAYERS : I LOST COUNT AT 26 LAYERS
When I started.. I did not know what I was in for. I never estimated I'd use this much time since this is my first time to paint hair as detailed as this and also smudge and add a lot of details.... I ended up using 9 sore hours. Lol...
PROCESS
I had already increased the structure and sharpness of the picture significantly on Snapseed app before exporting it to Autodesk. So I was pretty set to go so I went straight for the hair. I created the foundation which was just dark brown on a layer, added lighter brown strokes on it on two different layers, then I separately added the more complex tiny stranded details - a bunch of new curves on new layers....
I created a whole new set of layers to add add shadows to the strands curving.
In total = 16 layers for the hair and I was not done yet.
I moved to the face and did the smudging. This time I did it differently as I added more time to looking out for the details and colour paths. After that, I duplicated it and set the blending mode into "Multiply" and a little bit of reduced opacity, the work got deeper.
On newer layers, I painted more shadows and highlights to the lips, nose, eye lids and eye bags and blending them using my smudge brush.
Along the line.. I was tempted to leave the hair as brunette instead of blonde.
I then move to the eyes and tried to recreate what I saw..
The background wasn't such a hard job. So I later went over with the paint brush 4 on the hair with the colour set to bright yellow and made the curves on the hair jump out more.
There's the final result.... What do you guys think?? Worth the while or not?