Another Venus

I keep coming across these models who remind me of the Botticelli Venus. The previous two were these:

   

The left one is in acrylic with a stencil background on thin birch board, while the right one was done on paper using Daler Rowney inks for the background, skin, and dress, with watercolors incorporated for the features. And today, I did another, again using the Daler Rowney inks as the base, but mixing them to get a much pinker tone. I washed the paper with water and then squeezed eye droppers full of Flesh Tint and Fluorescent Rose inks and painted the entire page by combining them and adding water until I got it to the proper tones. Then I used the Daler Rowney Red Earth for the hair (mostly), and painted in the shading and details with watercolors.

There's a lot of pencil showing in this one, because I kept redrawing it to get the hands right. They were really difficult! So the outlines are not terribly solid in some places, but I feel like I conveyed the pose fairly well. The only problem with using the inks as base is that it's hard to save whites—the back of her shoulder, the top of her arm, and the left side of her face were much lighter in the photo. But I do love the variation on flesh and pink tones I managed to create.

I drew this about eight days ago and just today found the time, energy, and concentration to paint her. Not great output lately!

"Venus Variation"—Daler Rowney inks and watercolors on 140-lb. Fluid coldpress paper, 12x16 inches.