Jazmine

Today’s model is Jazmine, making her debut. I started out by drawing her and colouring her in with charcoal grey, fuchsia, leaf green, mustard, iris blue and a tiny bit of poppy red.  Rather than continuing with my minimalist approach (which really works) I thought I’d be different and add a lot of colour, using mustard rather than blank paper for highlights.  I need to keep trying different approaches to keep everything fresh.

For the wetting stage, I started with a water brush as usual but only used this on the hands, hair, face and bits of the chest.  For everything else, I used a wet scrunched up paper towel just to be different.  Here’s what I ended up with:

The values in this are all quite light.  For my normal minimalist approach, this is great.  But for one like this with lots of paper coverage, I need heavier values.  So I added a second coat of colours and wetted this time with a water brush, resulting in the final painting.

The final version definitely looks better.  The hair is the real highlight , perfect texture and with the blue and fuchsia colours livening out what would otherwise have been a plain charcoal grey.  The rest is OK, although a definite step down from the minimalist approach.  You can see in places where there’s a loss of accuracy in switching from brushes to paper towels, so maybe I should stick to brushes.  And colour-wise, there’s too much mustard for my liking and not enough of the red, green and blue.  The problem is this is hard to tell from looking at the pencil marks – it’s not until you apply the water that you find out what’s really going on.

Anyway, Jazmine’s up for sale.