More in the theme

Continuing very loosely with the same theme (goddesses? mythological characters? yeah, something like that), and with the same size and medium, I did go outside the color palette on this one, although there is still a tiny bit of each of the colors (Cobalt Orchid, Light Ultramarine, Red Oxide) in this one. But my primary objective was to use this beautiful and subtle Titan Green Pale from Golden Acrylics as a background for a goddess of equally subtle coloring: Ngame, the West African moon goddess. Ngame created the heavenly bodies and brought life and soul into every living thing with her beams. She is known as the White Goddess, according to Robert Graves, and is also considered a muse, a patroness of creative inspiration, so it seemed appropriate to make a painting of her!

As my model I chose someone I have painted once before, the beautiful Diandra Forrest. I first cast her (in watercolor with an acrylic background) as Akata Witch from Nnedi Okorafor's book, back in 2022, but for that painting I used a much younger reference photo (the character in the book is 14). But for Ngame I chose a mature photo, although I still went with the free-flowing shock of hair rather than the short cut or the long braids she sometimes wears.

I started out uniformly pale and then integrated subtle bits of all the colors, one by one, into the painting. As an albino person Diandra's skin tone is a very particular tint: It's not pink, not olive, but rather a distinctive shade of creamy white, with underlying green, blue, and lavender tones, and the shadows look brown, rather than gray. It's both fun and challenging to paint.

I enjoyed playing with a new tool to get her hair just right: I had ordered some plastic scrapers meant to be used with Gelli plates that one of my Let's Face It teachers had recommended for making stripes or patterns in oil paint, and I used one of them to "scumble" the colors together and put some texture into her soft cloud of hair.

The green is an unusual color to use for background when depicting a moon goddess in front of the full moon (one automatically thinks black, deep blue, gray, or sunset colors), but there is that moment just before dusk when the sky isn't quite blue or gray when you might see this shade in it, and I decided it was okay to accentuate that a bit. I did try glazing over it with light ultramarine, but it didn't really work, so I wiped off most of it, just leaving some to be the darker shadows on the surface of the moon.

I thought about adding some gold medium onto the moon, like I did in my last few portraits (as halos), but decided it would take away from the primary focus (Ngame), so I left it off.

"Ngame"—acrylics on thin birch board, 12x16 inches.

(Note: My scanner cut off a bit of the top left corner and also a tiny strip of her shoulder on the right—the original doesn't have the moon falling off the page up there quite as much, and also shows more of her arm. I have to do these in two pieces and put them together in Photoshop Elements, since my scanner bed is 9x12 and these are 12x16.)