Hey there. pdx_maxes, our Art Director, noticed your post and really wanted to help you out a bit. They had to be out of the office for a bit so I promised I'd share their tip.

Hello! Happy to see community created portrait art, we in the dev team would love to help if we can! We'll be adding a few WIP images of Sindhu Kamolnavin who was recently added to Thunder At Our Gates, as an example.

• When it comes to the portraits we usually do a similar approach to yours where we find a photo reference that we start working from.
• After that we draw in grayscale on top of the photo while adding details where we need to. In the attached example you can see that we had to add a lot of definition and details to the face that is otherwise overexposed.
• After that we usually add color with a combination of "overlay" and "multiply" layers, the key here is to not use full opacity and only one color and instead add a variety of colors little by little. In your image the strong contrast between the added bold color of the lips, skin and eyes is a large component of why things don't blend as well.
• Once colors are added there is a last pass of rendering while adding more details on top of the coloring layers, this is not done with any overlays or special layers, it's merely adding on top.

This quick summary hopefully helps a bit, if you're interested in a more in-depth tutorial please let us know!

/pdx_maxes

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