My own spin

What I like to do, if I have time, is to try out the teacher's assignment once, using the given reference and methods, and then do it again but this time with my own spin. So today, I decided to have another shot at Week 4's exercise. I used inks, watercolor, a little colored pencil, and then ended up adding Micron pen, which wasn't part of the original assignment but seemed necessary with this mostly monochrome image. I also added some background of my own, using the gesso trick with a stencil and then painting over it with transparent color once it was dry.

The reference photo is of Ellen Terry, a renowned English actress from a theatrical family, who performed both Shakespeare and comedy between about 1856 and 1922, with two short hiatuses for relationships, once at age 16 (a marriage to 46-year-old painter George Frederic Watts, who made her famous as his model) and again for six years while involved with the architect Edward William Godwin, with whom she had two children out of wedlock. Other than those brief pauses, she acted for nearly 70 years, also briefly managing a theater, and appeared in films from 1916 to 1922. The photo was taken of Terry at age 16 by Julia Margaret Cameron, just one of the artists and photographers in the Pre-Raphaelite and Asthetic movements who sought her out after her association with Watts.

In the photo, Terry is leaning against a wall-papered wall, but since I had nothing with that kind of repetitive pattern, I instead did a botanical theme. I think it still works. I chose this particular photo because it repeats two of the challenges of the Week 4 lesson, to capture a person in 3/4 profile, and to render hands (or in this case a single hand). I will confess it was a difficult exercise, and the lines of the face aren't quite right; but I am pleased with the color scheme, which somewhat duplicates the sepia-tone photo but with a little "blush" on it. Looking at it against the photo, I'm thinking I need to darken the shadow behind her....

Gesso, stencil, pencil,  Liquitex, Daler Rowney inks, watercolors, Micron pen (brown), on 140-lb. hotpress (smooth) Fluid watercolor paper, 8x8 inches.