Details, details

After I painted the stencil accents onto my "Akata Witch" portrait the other day, I took the leftover acrylic paint and made a particularly vibrant background for another portrait. So today, it was time to paint something in acrylic. I thought about another book character, but instead settled on that book's author, Nnedi Okorafor, as my subject. She is a genial-looking woman with some super wild hair, and I thought it would be fun to immortalize her alongside her character, Sunny Nwazue.

I found a photo in which I particularly liked her expression, but her hair was down, and the top of her head had been cropped off. Since her characteristic hairdo is with her hair up in a giant twisty beehive, I looked for and found another photo with that hairstyle in which she was holding her head at almost the same angle, and then used the face from the former and the hair from the latter to make what I wanted.

Many people who paint in acrylic don't start with a drawing, like watercolor painters mostly do; since the medium is opaque, you end up painting over a lot of the lines of your drawing as you go along. But I still like to start with a drawing, even if I do have to paint over some of it, just to have a general idea of where I'm going.

I worked hard on this portrait all morning and part of the afternoon; the skin tones and shadows were challenging, as was the 3/4 pose, and I wanted to get it just right. Finally, after a million small tweaks, I decided I was done...but somehow she just didn't look right. I kept looking at the photos: Did I get the angle of the eyes wrong? Are the features too small for the head? Is the body too big for the head? Is it the hairline? I couldn't figure it out. I was about to ball up and throw away the palette page with all my leftover paint on it, when it suddenly came to me: In painting her skin, I had covered over the lines for her eyebrows, and never put them back in! And with a couple of strokes, her whole face came into focus and looked like the person I was painting. Who knew that eyebrows were so crucial to personality?

This is "Nnedi Okorafor"—acrylic paints, stencil, gesso, spray paint, pencil, Stabilo, on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress watercolor paper, approximately 12x16 inches.