Anya 1

I found several nice colorful pictures of Anya Taylor-Joy to practice with.
I liked this picture due to the nice color, even though the the lighting is poor - completely flat from a flash near the camera. Flat light is very hard to draw and make it three dimensional looking. Every painting needs a challenge! But I liked the color and the hard edged earring, which contrasts well with the soft skin. A soft painting will just look blurry if there is nothing sharp to contrast it to. Normally a face only has eyes to add any sharpness to a painting,
I purposefully lowered the contrast and detail on the dress to keep the attention on the face.

I have been asked about my odd process. Two reasons - One, it comes from learning to paint with pastels. Pastel paper will only hold so much chalk, so you need to get as close as you can to the final value value/color as you can from the start. Also there are not many shades available in pastel sets, so you start with the closest you have for an area. Once blocked in, you make all the intermediate colors and missing colors by either blending with your fingers or cross hatching additional colors on top, or both. You continue to refine base colors by adding and mixing in additional color. Only when you have all large areas as close as you can get to the correct value and color do you finally draw details.
Two - the other reason I like the mosaic style block in is that until I have the full canvas covered, I cannot correctly judge value and color. Everything depends on what is next to it, so getting a first pass down quickly lets you then see everywhere you guessed wrong and you start correcting all the base colors before you start details.

Blocking in a single color for skin and then adding highlights and shadows works well for stylized, semi-cartoon paintings, but for me it doesn't work well for realistic painting. There are too many different colors in skin to start with a single color. Most of what you just put down is wrong. I know a lot of folks have learned to work this way, but trying that method was why it took me so long to be able to do digital painting. I never got results I liked. I still keep trying, as it is probably a lot faster, but not very successfully so far.