Using Burn/Dodge Tool to make Digital Portraits

Hi everyone! Sorry for the lack of updates here at the blog. Hopefully here's something that would inspire you to keep making art that matters to you. :)

While vexel portraits are mainly used with the pen tool, it would be interesting to do experiments and try making portraits with different tools and methods. The burn and dodge tool, as well as the gaussian blur filter, was something I proved had its uses in making cool digital portraits, although they won't be called vector/vexel anymore. :)

One of my earlier works last year was "January", a portrait I made for a friend.

I didn't record what I exactly did, but first I start of with the pen tool to create the shapes for the hair, face and shirt. The hair strands, using the pen tool, and then I experimented with the burn and dodge tool to make the shadows. Check out the basic tutorial for using these tools here. 

Here's another example, this time using mixtures of the pen tool, gaussian blur, and the burn/dodge tool.

The burn/dodge tool is often used in making photo enhancements but works well with adding shadows to portraits like these too.

I'd like to improve and venture on with making art, so hopefully in the next days, I'd be sharing more stuff with you guys.

Thanks for reading!

-Tactician Jenro