Portrait: Raymond Carver

I've been working on a series of portraits as a personal
project recently (more coming soon) like most personal
projects I set up for myself, it's as much about the content
as it is about experimenting with new medium and process.
The above portrait is the great short story writer Raymond
Carver, one of the more influential writers in the short story
form from the last  30 years.  His writing is incredibly lean,
brutally honest and full of from 80's Americana, trailer parks,
and suburbs populated with Violent and vulnerable characters
on the verge of, or diving straight into completed ruin and
destruction. (see his collection Cathedral if your interested)

For this image I was playing with a mixture of ink line (in face)
Pencil line (the coat) The face was first painted underneath with
gauche, the ink line was layered in digitally, and extra layers of
shading in his face and jacket were drawn separately on tracing
paper with flat black ink washes, then layered in digitally, lightened,
and made transparent. For touch ups, I went back and cleaned and
adjusted and tweaked areas with the clone tool, and digital painting.
This is somehow what I ended up with.