Lady of Sunlight

I did this one just before New Year's but I've not been well enough to upload it anywhere until now.

This was mostly to test out the ArtGraf watercolour graphite and the Finetec gold watercolours to

together. I was planning on using the ArtGraf pencils in there too but it didn't seem to happen that way. 

I actually took quite a lot away from painting this. Most importantly...I really like just doing small quick paintings. I keep doing big long projects but to be honest just doing something that's A4 and takes a day and a night to finish.... it's so much more satisfying. I get so bored of most of my paintings by the end of them so surely that results in worse art over all. Besides just doing loads of quick paintings would surely improve my skills faster anyway, at least for things like anatomy and composition...both things I need to work on. 

There's a few anatomy mistakes here and there, the worst being her neck..... that bit in the top middle's meant to go out rather than in but even once I realised that I wasn't able to rub it out to fix it. She also had a very hollow stomach, like a skeleton, but at least I mostly was able to fix that by darkening her dress. Hands are also a bit weird...

having said that I'm fairly happy with her face, yeh it's not perfect, but considering how hard it can be to draw heads in that position the face came out far better than I expected, even if the neck did not. 

Also both the gold and the graphite watercolours don't really look their best on actual watercolour paper. For the gold I'll have to if I'm just adding touches of gold to something but if they were the main feature like here I'd pick a different paper in the future.

Lastly....having more gold than black doesn't really work as well as I hoped. I added in more hair to try to help but now I have 50/50 and I don't know if it's any better. 

Ah well, this was just for testing it out, I'm already working on another tiny black and gold one so hopefully I'll have learned enough for it from this.