Sisters - 3

 Spring is coming. The weather is getting warm and sunny(though winter was not harsh this year).

While waiting for flowers to bloom I completed this blog entry. Eventually the artworks are already finished a while ago. These ones took me quite some time. Not because it was so hard to draw and paint but rather, I had some changes in my situation. I don’t want to explain this in detail but roughly, I had to choose what to do and where to stay. After lots of overthinking, I decided to return home, at least for a while, because I missed my family and friends. Last year I barely saw them, so I decided to come back home and spend some time with them. That is why the second redraw took a while to finish. I think it took 3 weeks to complete but it actually took like 6-7 hours to finish.

This redraw includes this sweet, sweet lady.

She is so adorable and charming. There is nothing I want to change about this sketch, I just need to add a fitting background.

Sketching part was rather simple. Unfortunately, this cannot be said for the painting process. Background, dress and furniture worked out fine. The problem occurred when I started on the hair. My initial idea was to make the hair blonde. But the thing is, yellow is one of the colours I use the least. Thus, I don’t know how to use it well. So for the hair it was just my logic doing its best. Since grey was used mainly, I thought of making the gair grayscale and then add the yellow. After shades were added with grey which I did in a lazy way. But I choose to continue and moved to the next step, which was applying the yellow. That’s where problem showed its face. Yellow looked just so cheap, it was looking like something I painted with no skills at all. It had to stop. To guide myself, I looked at some blonde hair tutorials and some images. It is that moment I noticed, blonde hair barely has any yellow on it (In terms of painting). It was all shades of brown (Chuckles, I am in danger.). Following some deep erasing, I used brown to add the darkest shades. And… It looked so UGLY. Brown just looked so ugly. I know, it is a part of the process, and it may look harmonious when finished, yet, at that moment it looked so ugly that I just decided to make the painting with two colours only. There comes the second erasing process. As you can imagine this damaged the paper a bit but hopefully, it doesn’t have big significance. You can’t see it, but I feel it while I was adding the final touches. The paper doesn’t let me add more paint because of the parts that are worn. Though, as I said it’s not the biggest problem ever. Paper had some health to endure one last try. In the end, the hair ended up grey just like the rest of the painting. Even though it makes me happy to finally finish the painting, I was not totally satisfied with the hair, but I have to declare things done so that I don’t stay with them forever.

 

After the whole painting is done, I wondered why I wanted to make the hair blonde. Now I realize both my expectation from my painting skills was too much. I must study hair. Trought the years my technique didn’t change a lot. It is not detailed, quite a simplified hair. But for this piece, there should have been something nice and aesthetic. It needs to look fluffy and pretty but the way I painted it is just very flat. That is the cause of the problem, and I wish I noticed it before. So that I may have tried to achieve such effect (maybe a redraw again? (not yet though)).

Then comes the second part. This piece was developed with another sketch. The other sketch is also a lady with a dress, so I decided to make some connection between them. Both are painted with same colours and composition is pretty much the same. Hoping that they will look compatible, side to side.

This is very blury but thats how the paper is.

This one didn’t pose me a significant hardship. Perhaps because I felt like doing the same thing again. Though there are numerous flaws I can point to. First, it looks a bit empty because the dress takes quite a space in my a5 paper. Which also causes the objects behind to be covered. Even there is a girl in the middle, the painting feels a bit… empty. It feels just empty looking at this. I thought of using a bigger paper, but I just couldn’t and still cannot visualise how I could make everything fit without making a big change. So, it was best to continue (just like always). I feel like, my performance with this one was lover than the latter. Especially on the dress. Sometimes I get confused because there is no idea in my brain how to figure things out (That is why I must study). Now thinking, I could have searched for a reference for the dress, but it is not my habit, I almost never do this (not something to be proud of). Thus, the lower part of the dress ended up big and ugly in the simplest terms. But at least hair looks better, it has more volume.

Some process photos.

Here is how they look side to side.(They look kind of cute actually)

They could have been so much better. Still, I cannot assess what is missing completely because I don’t have the experience. Yet it is kind of nice to notice what skills I need to develop. Hair in this case, and it looks like I must make a lot of studies. Another point is that I have been thinking about a while is how to decide if an artwork is finished or not. Is it done when I am done with painting? What else I need to do afterwards to make things better? Am I missing something obvious? Perhaps that is something I also need to study. Flaws are not nice but at least they give me a direction on what should be the next step.

Anyways take you for your time. Bye for now.