Portrait - Granddad

I've been messing around with finding a new painting process lately. Something that's more composition, color, and lighting focused rather than just straight up drawing/painting something. I believe that especially as an illustrator I like to convey a mood and a feeling in a piece. So I've been experimenting with that.

I wanted to test this process today on something pretty quick and I saw a photo of my Granddad posted online and knew I wanted to paint it. Him and his twin sister turned 89 recently. He's fallen off the roof before, and does situps every morning at 6am without fail. And he still likes to play pranks and joke around. Inspiration. I like doing portraits, I didn't have to take time figuring out composition or designing anything from my head. So it was definitely good practice. You can see the original photo below. This was good practice for me because I could change the lighting and mess with with the focus and use light and dark as a compositional tool. I'll probably be testing this painting process and "style" on future illustrations and portraits as well.