Last night and today I spent working on all the paint areas. I started with the face, painting the eyes and lips with mostly gouache (and some watercolor on the lips). Next, I painted the hair, working layer after layer to build up the depth, darkness, and apparent detail (I don’t attempt to capture every hair, but rather try to give it a natural texture).
I then painted the black leather of the bra with watery layers of black and gray gouache. The highlights are mostly the paper showing through, so it’ll have a slightly different color tone than the skirt. The skirt was next, but once again I had trouble facing a large area with water. I just can’t get a smooth coat of color across without either the water evaporating, or the brush leaving streaks. Before getting overly frustrated, I masked it off and reverted to airbrush. Starting with black acrylic, I coated the area lightly, then built it up until the shadow areas were near solid. I then mixed some gray and turquoise in and hit the mid-toned areas. On the next pass, I kept adding more and more white to the mix, working up the highlights softly. I then decided to go for the ‘sparkle’ finish, so I mixed steel and aqua iridescent acrylics and sprayed over the whole skirt, hitting the highlighted areas more than the shadows.
Once all that was dry, I used some acrylic black with a brush to define the creases in the material more. While I had it out, I mixed the black with a lot of water and washed the leopard spots on the bra (I played around with a few other patterns, but this still worked the best for me). Next, I mixed a turquoise-green gouache and washed it over the bra. I dry-brushed a bit on top of this with the same color to give it a hint of fur texture. I may use some colored pencils later to enhance that further. I finished out the leopard print with a wash of green within the spots.
The final bit I did today was adding white highlights to the skirt. If I have time still tonight, I hope to get the textured gesso down on the skin areas so I can begin blocking that in tomorrow…