Hey guys, Many of you will probably know the Character 'Walter White' or Heisenberg fro the AMC T.V series 'Breaking bad'. If not then you may recognise the actor Bryan Cranston from his other Hit T.V series 'Malcom in The Middle or Movies such as 'Drive and 'Little Miss Sunshine'. The piece was intended to be entered into the 'Threadless' Tishirt design competition but May require some finishing touches before entry. I have given a little information on each stage of the process starting at the end of the post, so you'll have to scroll down to the bottom if you want to follow it step by step.
7) Finally I just had the task of layering the portrait with the background design. This just involved playing with The Levels, saturation, vibrance, hue as well a the layer type. In the end I decided to make the Flames layer invisible, by changing it to 'Multiply'. I then played with the colours for a long time before finally deciding on a colour and level of vibrance. Initially the aqua colour was really bold and I think it domineered the piece rather than aiding the overall design. By lowering the lightness, hue and saturation i was able to have Hiesenberg's face only partially obscured by flame, as was my original intention.
6) I hadn't done any flames in Photoshop before so I did a quick tutorial to get the hang of it. The process was surprisingly simple (kind of) I picked three colours, white, very light blue and aqua blue the drew three thick straight vertical lines all next to each other. I Then used the smudge tool (at around %55 strength) to disperse the colours in a rough smoke/vapor-like form. This was the most time consuming part. I then chose -Filter-liquify and went over the flame ever so slightly with the liquify tool. This helped me get the thin, sharp, flame like edges.
5) To get an Idea of what type of background would look good I grabbed a few samples of google images . I wanted to have blue flames or 'Meth' smoke/vapor as a background to the piece would look complete and people would easily be able to understand the reference.
4)After Adding the third layer of Tone. I finished the beard detail as well as the glasses, beard and shadow. Then I just cleaned up all the edges and any excess spray marks.
3) I upped the saturation and opacity to around 75% and dropped the paint flow down to %30. I mainly used the airbrush tool with a realistic 'spray' brush preset for all the tone work and a square brush preset to the beard detail and other line work. I used a soft colour pallet for this piece but altered the levels at the end of the process to get a darker overall look.
2) I prefer to layer my colours with the lightest first and put the darker ones on as I go through the layering process. After Laying down the soft tones I added some darker flesh-tone colours and softened the black lines on the face to more realistic flesh colour. 
1) I started by sketching out The outlines and adding some lines for wrinkles, and beard texture. Again I am using A wacom intuos 4 (small) graphic tablet with a combination of CS4. Using a few photo references I then drew the basic lines and added some soft base colours. I wanted to make this portrait more realistic than the previous (Nucky Thompson) one, as It will possibly be entered into a T-shirt design competition and the the Character will need to be easily recognisable.
