Soldier

A nice character exploration portrait study I did. I focused on developing a character of a unique ethnic nationality, practicing sculpting a more aged character, and a character with deformities or other cosmetic applications.
You can see how much I changed from the initial rough drawing to the final result, how I didn't get the idea for the intense "claw scar" until after I began. That originally he was much younger and had a more "Central to Southern African" regional ethnicity to his features.
The backstory I came up with for this particular subject is that this aged man is between his 40s-50s and an experienced ex-warrior that lived during an era bygone such as ancient Egypt. I gave him that unique golden-brown coloration and double checked if light-brown/golden eyes were fairly common for people of that region. The scars I applied were a unique challenge for me as I had never drawn scars in a realistic fashion before. I pushed the extremity of his "old" injury so that I could practice drawing the effects a deep scar would have on a person's face. Hence the cataract in one eye, the split eyebrow, eyelid, ear, nose, and mouth. So I gave him an old "healed" scar that he received from a lion's attack when he was probably much younger. I also applied a neutral but still slightly disgruntled expression to convey what his attitude towards others might be like (aka not the friendliest sort to approach)