How can i turn this sketches into portraits?

[ChrundleTheGreat]

Im trying to make portraits out of these sketches of pen and paper,

i know they're not very well proportioned but i was hoping i could edit them with the selection tool later, my problem is im not sure how to draw them digitally to make them look good, they look worse when i try,

I dont know if they’re just unfinished or im doing something wrong, and if they are just unfinished i don’t know how what the next step is.
im drawing on an ipad using the sketchbook app, and i dont know exactly how to use pencil/brush tools or any digital drawing techniques to make it look right, im hoping somebody can help me with this, although any advice at all is welcome, i just dont know how to draw digitally at the moment…

[Heindal]

First of all, you shouldn't be to hard to yourself, these drawing aren't bad and probably better than anything I could draw. You have to find a software you can use without any other problems, I would probably use a pc or mac for that. Gimp isn't such a bad software and it is freely available (it took me some time to get customized with it, but yeah it has its pro and cons)

But there are other kind of drawing software as well. I once had a workshop with a great artist, who made some pencil drawing we wanted to use later for print production. We scanned them and began to work. We set the original picture in a layer below (background), and made a layer over it and than redraw the lines the pencil line on the new layer. So we now had the original in the background and the new drawing on the layer above.

After that you can change the lines in any way you like and even improve the original drawing. With that you can than start to add color step by step or layer by layer. For example you could make another layer over your new drawing and add a basic color skin, by filling the drawing piece by piece with just one color. After that you add another layer to add eye shades and or shadows. In most software you can also activate and deactivate layers.

For example you add shades to the eye on one layer and don't want to see them and or you hate what you did, you can just deactivate or delete this one layer and try again. Save often, use layers. Save several versions to have a fallback.

I'll add a screenshot with an example for the layers:

It's simple recolor job of the archer. I wanted here to have red cloth and red/dark pink hair.
On the left you see the image and the right are four different layers.
The original is on the lowest layer. The eyes show the visibility of the layer.

On the second screenshot you see just two active layers to show how I worked:

But how does the top layer look like?

Why did I do that? Mostly because I made a simple color switch on the second layer, but the hair did not have the color I wanted. I also use the trick to just copy the original and than altered its color and used it as some kind of overlay and just deleting anything I did not want to be changed. So the color of the skin remains.

I hope it will help you.
Good luck with your art.

[ChrundleTheGreat]

thanks a lot!
i really apreciate your help and kind words, i guess im just not very used to digital yet.
i did started using xgimp on the ipad (i dont have a drawing tablet) and i think i like the interface, it seems much better to edit images, although there are a lot of options and menus im not at all familiar with. im also having trouble finding the option to upload an image from my files, as this version of gimp opens in "community04.clickasound.com" and it doesnt seem to interact with my files at all, so when i click open, none of my files appear...
i can keep using sketchbook but it seems to have less options, and there is still some experimenting to do with brushes, i found out that modifying opacity helped a little and im using the pencill for coloring now (wich feels to me like the hardest part to get rigth), i also layered the backgrownd as sugested.
i hope i can finish this portraits soon enough.
thanks again for the help.

[egallager]

The "Create Art" page on the wiki has lots of great tutorials linked to from it, although some of them are a bit outdated now:
https://wiki.wesnoth.org/Create_Art

[roitsointra]

Let's start drawing with digital drawing software. That's the only way you can get better. You can start with https://krita.org, it's quite easy to use.

You can also see more instructions here once you start using it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv7Tu-cOzPwcoreball