Photoshop CS5 - Intuos 4 Large - 3 hours each - hard round brush and some custom multi-dot brush for the hair, or infilling.
A big hole in my portfolio has been painting human faces properly. I've struggled with proportions (often being just a little bit off) so I dedicated some time to tackling that problem. Feng Zhu said in one of his Design Cinema sessions that 'if you can't work with black and white, you can't work in colour'. I enjoy black and white anyway, so I thought it was a good opportunity to keep it simple and focus on the basics.
With these 3, composed as they are, you can see the progression from left to right, from my first attempt to last.
