Sauna

Digital portrait of Finnish actor Ville Virtanen, done in Procreate on iPad. The reference is a production still from a very cool movie called Sauna. Those glasses he’s wearing really jumped out at me. They are probably my favorite prop in any movie ever made.

I painted this one with the default acrylic brush. I have for some time been saying I needed to make myself accept seeing the brush strokes. This was me pushing on that. It’s swimming in brush strokes! But it looks pretty good.

My favorite bits here are the texture on his collar and the salt & pepper in his facial hair. I wanted to try to use the background color to “sweeten” some of the foreground colors. I did a bit of that – you can see it mostly in his jacket and a bit on the collar – but I didn’t have the conviction to make it particularly noticeable. Maybe I’ll get there someday.