A portrait I made as a thank-you gift for a friend who helped me resolve a certain important issue.

It's a character for his DND campaign.

While I don't know much about dnd lore and other stuff, I was intending to catch an essence of his character using mainly brief descriptions and moodboards.

Well I DO love painting smokey effects(I still have to get more gist over them), but this time I wanted to make it the most prominent part of the composition. This smoke\haze is a simple representation of the state of confusion, inner doubts and mild anxiety. Which may also be a fit for a young and a bit gloomy unexperinced magician.

I tried to make this painting look more oily by attempting to imitate impasto(that one technique where you not only painting, but also low-key sculpting with the thick and loaded strokes) in rebelle and It was quite hard and interesting experience! The most hard part was to deal with the face which is the main focus and shouldn't be screwed at any cost, so I had to make a way to do brushstrokes nuanced enough while at the same time not leaving them way too smooth or too dry. Besides, I also intentionally utilized the influence of the canvas texture on some spots where it made perfect sense.

I don't know If I'll try this oily impasto thing in a further pieces again, but what do I know is that this technique may work perfectly as a narrative tool.