Four Muses: Part Three

Been busy painting again and having loads of fun. Wish I had more time for it though and to write about it! And I’m still continuing with Alena Hennessy’s Four Muses unit in her on-line classes Watercolor Wonder, in which we practice portrait painting as outlined in Four Muses: Part One. Now all the four paintings are now complete, along with a bonus one for practice as I was enjoying this lesson so much! Today I would like to share my third Muse, once again featuring Little One but in a different style and at a more advanced level. So what have we here? Little One with leaves and flowers in her hair! How pretty…

Alena demonstrates how we can work in layers even with watercolors! Firstly, we spread a wash of yellow in the background and let it dry before embarking on a pencil sketch. I thought I would emulate her resulting painting but with Little One as our subject. First paint the face, then hair and start introducing the leaves in her hair which gave me the opportunity to play around with different shades of greens from various watercolor brands. Further highlight of this exercise was painting the flowers on her hair: Tapping on the color with a very wet brush and tapping more whilst surface is wet to achieve that feather effect. How gorgeous is that! Finishing touches were made with Uni Posca’s Paint Pen in white an gold.

And the above illustrates the watercolors I used: Kremer’s Pigmente in Skin Tones, Derwent’s Pastel colors set, Gansai Kuretake Tanbi and Winsor & Newton, hence a good combination of quality brands. Once again, I had a lot of fun with this session especially as I got to learn a lot of useful tips such as combining various shades of the same or harmonizing colors and creating beautiful ripply effects to paint flowers. And now looking forward to painting flowers with watercolors soon, now that Spring is here!

Please click here for more about Alena Hennessy and her amazing classes!