And it’s always been my goal to reflect that in my paintings. Now I’m a little bit closer with thanks to Tam for the inspiration to quit humming and hawing and standing there with my mouth open and just try. Like really really try, not just a half-assed attempt.

So what I did this week was I got up early on Monday morning, watched Tam’s videos for this week for her World of Whimsy 2 class which included a video on how to shade girls with darker complexions that was a result of me asking Tam how to do so and directly after watching I took 3 sheets of watercolour paper, drew lines on them cutting them into quarters and started drawing girls in each box. Then I painted my ass off all week until my hand ached from holding a paintbrush.

Admittedly, the first two pages were a bust with a lot of shading mistakes and poor colour choices, but the last 3 girls did I were pretty good so I figured I’d share those ones with you guys now, plus a 4th girl who was intended for a full painting but I’m not sure I’m going to because I’m not sure I like her shading.

This one was done using a dark brown watercolour pencil to do the shading, then painting over it with a mixture of acrylic paint and acrylic glazing medium. The tricky part in doing all of these girls was in trying to get their complexions even and as you can see, this one’s complexion, especially above her nose and between her eyes, is pretty uneven so that particular paint mixture wasn’t optimal. A final wash of the same mix, but thinned with water was put over this girl before I called her “done” and that helped even out her skin tone a lot. She has a beauty mark because some kind of black schmutz got on the page and it wouldn’t come off.

For all of the girls’ hair I had two options for black:

1. Premixed “metallic” black acrylic paint called “Black Pearl“
2. Mixing my own metallic black using black acrylic paint and DecoArt’s pearlizing medium (available at Michael’s)

I went with the latter because I thought it looked more authentic in that it appears a little texturized because the pearlizing medium does make it a little bit texturized. The Black Pearl paint would have been too smooth and is also a real bitch to draw on after the fact if you need to do touch-ups on the lines in their hair, which is the main reason I don’t like to use it.

Anyway, the girl above was definitely better than the first 2 pages of girls I did, but she still wasn’t there. The first 2 pages of girls were basically experimenting with colour and getting frustrated that I couldn’t get their complexions even. By the 3rd page I figured it out.

This is the one I personally like the best because her skin tone is even, her shading is a lot more apparent than in the other examples I’m going to post, I like her expression and I like her hair style/colours (the reddish brown colour is called “Royal Ruby” and is a dark metallic red that isn’t showing up well in the picture – trust me though, it looks cool). How I got her skin tone even was that I used the watercolour pencil to do my shading, then I went over it about 50 million times with a mixture of acrylic paint and glazing medium that was really thinned down with water. Like, too thinned down. The next time I use this shade (which is the same shade as the last girl, but she had her problems which I’ll explain when we get to her) I’m going to thin it a little less so I don’t have to do as many coats.

Obviously with this 3rd girl, I was going for a darker complexion and an even one at that. I think I was mostly successful, but I think if I were to do this colour again (I have a lot of practice left to do!) I might try using either a dark purple or possibly even a black watercolour pencil to do the shading because with how dark the skin tone is, a lot of it was lost. In person the shading sows up a lot better, but when I took pictures in natural light you get what you see here. Again with this one, I used the thinned down mixture of acrylic paint and glazing medium, but because this particular colour is a highly pigmented one, she only needed 2 coats to be considered finished. If I did any more, all of her shading would have been lost.

So those were my practice girls, which I’m pretty proud of. Of course I’m not showing you my other 2 pages of mistakes because they were REALLY awful, just know that I made them and we’ll move right along…

This girl was supposed to be “the real deal”, the one I made an actual painting out of, but now I’m not so sure because I don’t really like her hair and her shading got washed out by having to do so many layers of watered down paint. (Granted, her shading doesn’t look as ashed out in person as it does in this picture, but still…)

Originally I painted her to be a white girl that looks identical to everything you see here, but for her skin tone obviously. In the finished piece, she was going to have a black petticoat with red underskirts and a large red bindi jewel on her forehead. The background of the canvas was going to be red, black and gold splatters on a crackled white background with red and gold “chunky” glitter sprinkled over top. But now I’m thinking…should I go through all that effort  and use all those supplies on a girl I’m not even sure I like? I have two weeks until The Square Foot Show so realistically whatever I paint right now should be my 3rd painting for the show and I’m not sure I’d want to put this one in because I’m not sure I like her. At the same time, I’ve not liked girls at this stage before and the finished product has ended up being some of my favourite pieces so I should probably just keep going with it.

Being the August long weekend here in Canada, my plan is to forget painting for the next 4 days and play WoW with Blake so in that time I’ll give it a lot more thought and by the end of the weekend I should have my answer. I didn’t mention it but the paper I’d be using for her petticoat (I don’t even know if that’s what it’s called – the outside part of her dress) is black and embossed with vine-y flowers. I think at the very least I should give her a dress, even if she’s only going to be put in my sketchbook as a failed experiment.

Anyway, as far as art goes, I think I have the women of colour thing pretty much worked out and out of all the paint I have, I have 3 main complexions I can do: sort of a honey brown like the 1st and last examples shown, the darker one shown and one I haven’t actually used yet because I just found the bottle of paint this morning, but it’s actually called “Chocolate Brown” and that’s exactly what it looks like. All 3 of these colours can be darkened or lightened. (I have like, 10 different shades of browns, not counting metallics, but these 3 were the only ones that look like realistic skin tones.)

My next art objective is to figure out how to draw and paint Asians without them looking like bad caricatures, but I think that’s going to be something that’s kind of on the back burner while I perfect my women of colour. I cannot even tell you how excited I am to be able to, after the stupid Square Foot Show is out of the way, go back and recreate some of my favourite pieces with girls of darker complexions. And I keep saying “darker complexions” or “skin tone” or “women of colour” specifically because my girls don’t have a race necessarily.  They just have colours. Like, the one that may become a painting? She could be Indian or Black or Hispanic or even a multicultural mix of races. I’m not gonna specify. Does it matter? No it does not. I’m just happy to be able to paint them and have them be beautiful, that’s all.

So that’s what I’ve been up to this week and what I intend to be up to for quite some time.