Inspiration combo

I looked at a few things today and combined them to make this piece. A few weeks ago, Angela Kennedy did a lesson for LFI2024 with a redheaded model and a background filled with painted leaves. And on July 1st, Dana Primrose Bloede posted a reference photo that was her challenge for a July portrait. Since there's only one more day left, I thought I'd better get on that! 

I had initially planned to paint this in acrylics on a board, but I didn't feel like getting into all that today and decided instead to do a version of what I had thought of for that project in watercolor.

Rather than painting Angela's leaves, I used a stencil to give a feeling of seaweed in the background, and instead of doing a straight portrait of the model with chiseled cheekbones and pouty lips that Dana supplied, I decided to turn her into a mermaid.

After I made the drawing in Uniball pen, I painted a watery background, and then gave an undercoat of green to my mermaid. After that all dried, I added the stenciling and then painted over the green in various skin and shadow tones to model the planes and shadows of her face, hand, and shoulders. Like Angela's lesson, I decided to do her hair as a block of blended color rather than trying to make it look realistic by separating it into strands, and I think that suits the style of the rest of the painting.

The green skin gave me a throwback memory to an Orion, one of the alien characters on the original Star Trek. But once I got the overtones on and put the seaweed in the background, I feel like the whole mermaid thing came together.

This is Uniball pen and Paul Jackson watercolors on Fabriano 140-lb. paper, 9x12, and I'm calling her "Marina."