Let's Face It, Week Four

The title of this could be, Let's Face It, Hands Are Hard. Yeah, that was the part of the lesson I really needed, and yeah, I bollixed it a bit. Admittedly, they were folded up in a super complicated way, but if I'd spent half an hour more in the drawing process before jumping to paint, they would have looked less like someone's hand with extra fingers grafted on and more like a real pair.

I was fairly pleased with the rest of it, although as usual I varied the lesson a bit since I didn't have all the materials. Only the primary wash was to be watercolor (the cloud of hair and the shape of the face) and everything else was supposed to be colored pencils, but A. I don't own many (half a dozen random colors in watercolor pencil, which runs if you get water on it, since it's supposed to!), and B. I'm not really a pencil kinda gal. I did end up using a brown one to add some shadows and some definition to the hair at the end. I did use my Uniball to do the eyelashes, because I also didn't have a teensy tiny brush. Everything else is watercolor. Also a new experience was working on hotpress paper (smooth) instead of coldpress (textured/rough). It was actually like painting in my sketchbook, so not all that different. Easier to do fine details (although you might not notice here!).

Here are the reference photo and the photo of the teacher's final product. She liked the red and blue combo but decided to switch them; I just couldn't let go of the idea of long red hair. She also ended up doing some of the blueberries in gold, but I couldn't find my gold paint, so...no. I liked the blueberries against the red hair, anyway.

The other thing I did, a trick I learned from my previous class, was to put a light wash of pink ink behind the whole thing, to give it both a background and a glow behind the other colors of paint. I think it was successful on this assignment! Here is mine:

Daler Rowney ink, pencil, watercolor, watercolor pencil, Uniball pen, Signo white gel pen, on Fluid hotpress 140-lb. watercolor paper, 8x10 inches.