It's a thin line between...

Using a reference and copying and tracing a reference.

You often hear the argument fro artist that using references for you work, or finding images online to create you work is a bad thing.
In all honestly the problem comes when artist replicate line for line what they are viewing

A reference is just merely something to glance at, and give you ideas as you sketch your image.

So I went and made a image inspired by 2 separate images


1) A head shot of the often underrated hottie, Natalie Dormer ( Game of Thrones, Margery Tyrell) sporting a bad ass shaved head hairstyle...

I also grabbed a image done by Marc F Huizinga, who draws and damn wicked portrait of Wonder Woman, check him out on INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/marc.f.huizinga/

So after so Photoshop trickery, cutting and twisting I arrived at a template and inks as you see here; In essence we have natalie's face and hair cropped onto Marc's WW's torso and shoulder...

As you can see, the final image is certainly different then what I started out with, and I added the nipples just to really illustrate the message that we don't copy every line EXACTLY as we see it.Just use what is on the image as a GUIDE and allow yourself room to be creative with the lines you put down

And here is the final image...

Hoped this helped and look forward to some more BTS from yours truly in the future!