Hey. This is a self-portrait WIP that I have been working on in PS CS2.
Not sure if I have the inspiration to continue it however…
C&C please.
Attachments
too blurry, very few colours
this face looks flat
proportions… good, I think, except of lower part
from photo or memory?
Well it was from a photograph. I know that it’s blurry - I’m going to fix that later. Yes I need to add more shading to give it depth. I’ll work on the proportions too. Thanks.
no no no, your approaching this all wrong, do a google search on photoshop painting tutorials. dont use the smudge tool to paint.
When you’re shading, you have 4 choices normally:
A) Use the burn tool, changing between midtones and highlights accordingly (most simple, and looks alright, although the colours always look “flat”)
B) Manually change every colour as you paint on with the brush
C) Set a different (darker or lighter, whether you’re doing shadows or highlights (and try to mix in another hue, just slightly though)) colour to the brush, put its opacity at, say, 10%, and work in with more and more layers of that colour. If you want to make a smoother gradient, just ALT+click one of the colours you want to smudge, set the brush to 50%, and brush inbetween the two. The colour that you selected will not be affected, but the other colour will be shifted 50% in that direction.
D) Mixture of all the above.
It’s labourious, yes. Oh, and when shading you should set your brush (if you use a tablet) to pressure opacity and pressure width.
Hope that helps. It looks good though; just a little blurry. And try to remember that you shouldn’t try to darken a colour, because that’s unnatural. Everything usually has mixtures of different hues. Gives it depth and all that.
Edit/ Oh yeah, and your eyes are much too big. 
Matt
Thank you so much for all the advice. I am a beginner in Photoshop, so I know little of how to properly paint. Hopefully with more practice I can improve. Thank you once more.
No problem. If you have any questions, just PM or email me 