Rowan Fairy (Finished)

So, for this one I just wanted to paint rowan leaves really, though you can’t see them here yet. I decided to do the sketch without them, just because the sketch was small and things would have gotten confusing with a pile of leaves dumped on top of her.

So in that aspect it worked, however she doesn’t quite feel like she’s interacting with the leaves, hiding behind them when I carefully placed the leaves not to cover the interesting bits of her. Maybe I should have moved those interesting details around so I could fit more leaves over her.

Rather happy with her expression, you can find the reference for it here: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/closeup-portrait-curious-young-girl-looking-200661203

 Here we have what inspired the painting, a chance to do et on wet autumn leaves. Leaves start changing colour at the bottom and then work their way up, often the midrib will be a few shades behind the rest.

Her hair’s not going to stay blonde, though it could have been an interesting direction to go. :)

 

Her hair was fun, I really enjoyed painting the red to orange transition.

Everything else at this stage was a bit of a mess and that mostly came down to colour. This was partly poor planning, I thought about the colours of the foreground leaves but not what they would be like darker which I needed for her wings and the background.

It was also a case of bad lighting. I only had a few hours of daylight at that time of year, it’s been snowing constantly, and at night-time my room strips all yellow light away. I ended up leaving her skin to be finished right at the end but the other yellows are over saturated from overcompensating the blue lighting.

The background was a case of it looking really cool as a little sample which I didn’t consider would be too detailed scaled up for a background.

So on the technical side of things I made the background with a lot of masking fluid and negative painting: Basically I put a layer of paint down, masked out leaves, added another layer of paint, repeat once more.

It was fun to do, on a smaller scale, in a different situation when you’re not just wanting a wee bit of background detail.

Filled in the branches, pretty straight forward, added shadows to her body and wings, knocked back the leaves in the background which took a while.

Her face was another struggle. I didn’t check her expression often enough in the mirror at the start which made some errors I had to work over. The expression itself was pulling me out of my comfort zone: the way her nostrils stretched with her slightly off to the side smirk really threw me for a while.

So that’s her finished, just in time for Faebruary, not quite the direction I was aiming at but definitely a learning experience.