(This was posted at another forum as a tutorial, and I am posting it here at the request of Kokoro, for whom I did it in the first place…Although this is not done in ZBrush, it easily could be, all you need do is don’t use layers, use flat color material, and lower RGB levels to build colour gradually… )
First things first…
This is the first stage of a painting which I will post all stages of. It is being done in the most basic of programs for this sort of work, Adobe PhotoDeluxe, and uses 3 of the 5 tools this has…Brush, Line, and Smudge…These have only size and colour parameters and that’s it, so my point here is that these methods can be reproduced in any painting app.
So… Stage one, the original drawing…
I wanted to do this from the start as a tutorial, and I also knew that I wanted to do a portrait of a woman. I have always found that certain women make excellent subjects for classic portraiture, since they are ‘prototypical’, or very original in their context, and suddenly ‘Salome’ jumped into my mind. I though of a modified ‘Arabesque’ pose, and sketched it on the screen as a ‘stick figure’…On this I located the joints, and set the rotation on them, followed by doing a very clear, and fairly accurate outline of the form.
The main thing I was looking for here, was to make sure the proportions were what I wanted, and the pose was exactly what I saw in my mind. I then put in a clear indication of the shadow areas to define the volume of the form, followed by removing the ‘skeleton’ so it wouldn’t interfere with the glazing to come…And since I intend to keep these forms, the drawing has to be as close as possible to the finished forms.
At this point, I also do some indications of the colours I will use for some of the details, and since I will add a tray, I throw in a couple of lines to act as a ‘locator’ for the tray I will add later…
There will be 8 sections, ask any questions you might have on any point, and I will answer them to the best of my ability.
This is not the only way to paint of course, but I hope you will get some tips from my methodology.
NEXT: The first glazing, and a little explanation of my single-layer glazing techniques… 
