I try to make historical person for Latvia and former Russian Empire - Krišjānis Valdemārs (Wikipedia-EN).
My wish is to make picture as close and real possible. But I am doing such kind of work first time.
Not much of his photos are available as he lived and died in 19.cetury. His photo in young age helps to understand what hides under beard. I must say that I realy enjoy process,
1 because this is one of most important men in Latvian history,
2. it involves research, reconstruction, imagination and many different techniques and tools of blender. Thanks also to amazing ability to manipulate and render hair and skin. Each time I make check-renders and render-engine in view-port, I am stunned by look and this brings so much joy.
This is what I achieved so far (with and without beard)
These are some of references:
Maybe here are some portrait/sculpting experts who can suggest corrections.
I am on process to correct grey hair spots on beard, correcting brows, making eyelashes and improving skin material.
Thanks for CC!
Attachments
I like where this is going! A stern expression and the hair looks great. Take a look at the “Emily Cycles” thread for some great tips on getting a good skin shader though. What are you rendering in? Cycles or Internal?
Hi! Thank You. Definitely Cycles. That’s what I started learning Blender and never ever tried internal. I fell in love in procedural and other abilities of nodes so it was like hallelujah 
Yes I am investigating many treads about skin and hair, so I will definitely look at Your suggested Emily tread. Let’s say I just started to make skin… at the moment it has quite rough and simple maps.
Update…with little improved skin.
I must say that I’ve made some lame mistake. SSS shader still available in GPU experimental, so i forgot to switch it on, so my image was without subdermal and any scatering.
So this is another check after making another bunch of improvements. And as You notice, most obvious change is the skin shader. I studied number of treads in different forums, articles, researched typical facial textures of color, veins, spots, pores, locations of them, wrinkles. I also tried to improve facial forms in order to be anatomicaly correct, but this process is still in progress. Here is the moment to say: “Big Thank You!” to real expert, my fellow-countryman - Uldis Zariņš, who gave me some advices and checked if model proportions and forms are somewhat correct. Uldis is real expert of human anatomy and wrote BOOK “Anatomy for sculptors” which I can suggest everyone interested in knowing more about human anatomy for sculpting, topology, etc.
Tasks to come are improvement of ear, eyes, eaves, tweak beard and step by step start to dress our national pride and give him his famous glases.
I think it’s time to dress him. But it seems that I should redo sculpting of wrinkles.
