My FB friend Dana has been posting a reference photo every month and challenging whoever is interested to paint it. I looked at this month's a few times, and every time I looked at that headdress I thought,
Nope! But...I kept being drawn back to this photo, because what fascinated me was not the elaborate headdress but the look in her eyes and the exceedingly unkempt, worried eyebrows! It was such an anomaly, because she is dressed in this elaborate bejeweled dress, necklace, and tiara thingie, and has obviously taken some pains to wave her hair and apply makeup, and yet...those eyebrows! Maybe they just didn't pluck in those days? And the way she has them scrunched up gives her an air of anguish so at odds with the rest of her garb that it made me want to paint her.
I decided, therefore, to skip the headdress or whatever you would call it, and just give her a simple band that would hold back her hair but wouldn't distract from the expression on her face.
I was fairly happy with the face; but I made the dress too pale and the beads too dark, and then smudged them when I tried to muck with the necklace to de-emphasize its darkness, so this is a bit of a mess. But...it's been too many days since I painted, and I needed to fall back into it a bit, so Dana, here's what you get for August!
"Flapper Girl," pencil and watercolor on coldpress Fabriano, 9x12 inches.
