LFI 37...sort of

Week 37 of Let's Face It was a black/white/gray oil painting. I loved the reference photo, but I don't possess any oil paints, and although I'd like to learn to do that sometime, I'd rather wait to buy them until I will be using them regularly or even exclusively. So I decided I would just do a watercolor of the beautiful subject.

The thing is, though, that I loved the black and white. So I went back to a technique I have only done a couple of times before ("Smoker" and "Kurt Vonnegut") wherein you draw with a Uniball and then, before the ink dries and becomes waterproof, you use a paintbrush loaded only with water to move the ink around and create the lights and darks and shadows.

It makes for a little less stark image in terms of contrast, because the only way to get the darks super dark by doing this is to keep scribbling with ink and then moving it around before it can dry, and it's all too easy to mess that up and have some unlovely marks become permanent. So the lights and darks are more subtle here, especially regarding her black hair and in the darkest shadows. Her tank top was also black, but I chose to just suggest it with the outlines and a little shadow around the detailed edges, leaving the center pristine.

After I was done, I couldn't resist putting some pink into the rose, and echoed a tiny bit of it under her cheekbone; and then I inked in the border, and then I decided that some background color would really make the figure pop.

I'm pretty pleased with this, especially because I drew it freehand while the teacher used a grid! Some of the angles are not quite right, but all in all it's a pretty faithful reproduction of the model's stance.

"Blush Rose"—pencil, Uniball pen, water, Paul Jackson watercolors on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress paper, a little smaller than 9x12 inches.