Black Swan

A friend of mine kindly gave me some photoshop tips about blending and using varying transparencies of brushes, and introduced me to the idea of drawing in black and white and then adding colour on top. This really inspired me and was very helpful and I have tried to use these techniques in this painting of Natalie Portman.
Again, I drew it from scratch using a photo reference and I like how it looks much more evenly blended and realistic than the previous.

Digital painting no.2

I drew this from a photo reference of Alexa Chung - model, presenter and general fashion icon. This was an experiment with the hard brush on PSE8 to see how I could get blocky strong areas of light and dark but make it look realistic still and not too cartoon-y. Think it came out okay...

The hair hasn't worked at all with this technique, it looks pretty much like straw. Definitely going to experiment more with blending, transparency and softer brushes.