Happy New Hair!

Nope Little One doesn’t have a twin sister! I just had my hair done a week ago for the first time in 6 months. About time! Hair badly needed a good trim with highlights reinstated to disguise my grey hairs haha. And today, I wanted to share my happiness for this makeover and my progress with digital art with a before and after image. Back in 1980s Japan, we had a TV commercial for a shampoo I believe or some hair product, and the caption was “Happy New Hair” with a few people enthusiastically shouting the slogan… which got me to adopt this title for my painting here!

Before

On a 3×4 canvas, I began drawing my before image. Mostly with Medium Airbrush, but for the dress I opted for the Oberon brush to achieve a knitted texture onto which I added White Dots 5 from the White Dot set of brushes from Creative Market. Lashes were then drawn with Wet Smudgy Pen. Further volume on the hair incorporated using the Flowing Hair brush. Once I was happy with how she all looked I merged the layers together. So far so cute!

After

And all I had to do was merely duplicate the image and change the hair for one of them! A bit of trim as my hairdresser had done but with an eraser. Also used the auto-fill color to change some parts of the hair to a lighter shade and add more lighter colors as well. Literally highlighting my hair! Once I was happy, the layers of each image was in turn merged so I can combine and resize them together. So what do you think of my new hairstyle?

The Background

As you can see, I expanded the characters to fill up the canvas. The background color was firstly switched to Campfire Green. Having noticed the Magical Textures set of brushes (also from Creative Market) I had for some time overlooked, I decided to have a play around with them. First came the “Tigers” pattern in bright green, and wow, they actually look like grass in the background. Next layer came some blue reverse polka dotted pattern called “What is this” for which the blending mode was changed to Color Dodge to produce this interesting pastel tone. And now, I think I’ll leave it for now as I’m loving how it looks, and nothing else more needs adding. How cool is this now!

Another exciting play around with digital art. The possibilities are endless! And I enjoy drawing and painting about what is going on with my daily life. If anything interesting comes up, it makes a great inspiration which could further be developed into something fun, Hoping then that 2023 will bring in more exciting ventures worth creating about on canvas! Meanwhile, our Little One will always stay kawaii…