The painting I did of Merlin in the end of 2009 took approximately 8-9 days to finish. As always I changed some things that was a part of the reference photo I used, among other things his clothing. In the reference photo he was wearing a chain mail that I transformed into a cloak in fabric instead.

One of the things that I put a lot of work into in this portrait was his hair. Almost every hair is in the same place in the painting as it was that day the reference photo was taken, and a lot of them was painted one by one in the end. And again, very dark hair that is close to black is tricky to paint since it does have several levels of color. It all depends on the light and how the highlights will make the hair look.

Below is a gallery of the progress. There’s a larger image under the thumbnails if you click them.

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