Sometimes my work leads me down a path I hadn’t expected.  This piece started life as a practice for freehand portraits, using a stock model I started creating an outline of the key areas (yes tracing the shape of the portrait photo, you have to start somewhere!).  Firstly I selected a stock image from Envarto Elements and opened it up in Photoshop CC. I dropped the image on a canvas (600mm wide by 840mm tall) and set a white background layer to fill in the transparent areas, for what I had in mind for this exercise I didn’t need to worry about extracting the model. Click here to read the full story of how this image was made.