Face Purgatory in physical form

As you know, all of my work is created digitally. There are at least a few reasons for that, but probably the most important one is that digital painting is simply far more efficient and much better suited to the work of an illustrator — where we often change everything dozens of times, sometimes two days before the deadline.
Still, you can’t fool human nature, and sooner or later you start missing the traditional scratching, smearing, and messy process of real painting. Whenever I get the chance, I make traditional sketches with pencil or ink, even though those sketches aren’t actually required in the workflow.
Every free moment I have goes into Artist Proofs. That’s probably the closest thing to traditional painting while still being manageable — the small format doesn’t require sacrificing entire weeks of work. On top of that, there’s complete freedom of interpretation, so it’s a perfect way to reset my brain after intense illustration work.
But the most demanding form of painting is definitely so called "repaint". Not only is it created completely from scratch using traditional techniques, but ideally it should still resemble the original digital artwork…it's practically 1 to 1 recreation. And for years I kept saying — and promising — that I’d finally start doing repaints. And for years, I failed to follow through.
But eventually, the day came.
I decided that for my very first repaint, I would choose the most challenging subject out of everything I’ve ever done — with the idea that if I could handle this one, everything afterward would feel easy. At least in theory.