Here is a set of refined sketches for Tommy Thompson. I like to take my rough pencil sketch and move things around a bit in Photoshop, sometimes resizing, rotating, and distorting parts here and there. The top two sketches were created this way from the third image which is the original scanned sketch.
After scanning, I strengthen the contrast of my pencil sketch by using Auto Levels sometimes with an additional Levels nudge to further darken the blacks, and then I use Threshold to convert the pixels to either black or white. Making sure the Magic Wand's Contiguous and Anti-alias options are off, and Interpolation is set to Nearest Neighbor, I select and delete all of the white pixels and then begin to move things around. If I get one version I like, I flatten the image, copy it, undo the flattening, and then paste the copied version back into the file. Even though I've chosen Undo, the copied image stays in the Clipboard memory so I can paste it back in.
The top two sketches are getting a bit closer a good likeness. Tommy Thompson has a swoop nose (actually kind of like Nixon's) and heavy eyebrows that almost looked dyed black sometimes. His neck is fairly heavy with abundant wrinkles. These are the features I'm focusing on to get the likeness.
Here is a quick color study for the Tommy Thompson portrait. I'm not quite sure about background or concept yet, my intial approach or mood is to show a faltering nature, unsure, a subtle sense of defeatism. I never quite felt Tommy Thompson's campaign would go very far, maybe influence from the media opinion. And I had the feeling that he would have agreed. So I have tilted his head, lowered his gaze slightly, offset his coat a bit, to give a sense of unbalance.
