Today was very productive. With a simple background and no wardrobe to paint, this step of the process was quick and easy.
I started the morning masking the image, then airbrushing the background with a very, very light gray-lavender acrylic. In designing this image in photoshop, this background helped bring out the highlights in the model, as well as giving the overall image a nice tone.
Next, I freehand airbrushed five colors for the rainbow – light red, yellow, light aqua, light blue, and light violet. To finish the background, I airbrushed a mix of green and purple iridescent acrylics overall…

The remainder of the day was spent painting. I started with the face, painting the eyes and mouth (I once again added skin tone around the areas to help blending later, but I found myself coloring in the entire face to help see the tones better). Next, the hair, building up layers of watery gouache browns from ochre-red down to dark brown and black. I then painted the waist chain and charms with gray gouache, adding bits of black for shading, and white for highlights. While the black was out, I also painted the shoes. Then I used green watercolor for the rabbit’s foot, accents on the shoes, and the emerald in the clover charm. Again, I painted some skin tone around all these areas for later blending (including almost all of the foot areas, as they’re fairly small and I might not get much oil pastels in there).
With time remaining tonight, I was able to get to the textured gesso for the skin…