In the Shadows | Drawing with the Note 10+

I'm back! I did say I wouldn't be able to post anything for two days. I had to re-calibrate, or something. For work. After everything turned back to normal (meaning I don't procrastinate at work anymore), I treated myself to some art.

Supposedly, I was going to draw a self-portrait, but in the end changed my mind. Instead, I scrolled through my Pinterest board of portrait photos and chose something prettier to draw. I found this portrait photograph of a woman in the shadows of some, errr, leaves? (I was trying to remember the right English term, but couldn't.)

(Edit: I found the word. It's foliage. 😂)

And then, when I was already starting to sketch, I thought I wanted to try something different. Something stylized; not that I have a style to speak of, but I just really want to see if I can do something close.

The result looks a little awkward, but not horrendously bad, in my opinion.

Drawing In the Shadows

The sketch was the confusing part. Because I wanted to try stylized portraits, I felt like I had free reign on how the eyes, mouth, face would look like. The first one I did felt like I always did... which wasn't stylized.

The next one, I tried bigger head, thinner neck, but it looked weird to me! The final attempt was somewhere between the normal look and something different, where I tried to make the eyes larger, the nose smaller, the mouth fuller. I also tried to make the chin more pointy, and the jaw a little more prominent, but while in the process of completing it, it started to get weird, so I had to fix them.

In this work, I did something I used to do, but stopped practicing somewhere along the way. After the clean sketch, I did all flat colors first. This is quite opposed to what I do lately, where I would color each part one by one, as if I am coloring with my colored pencils.

Coloring the hair was difficult. I normally liked coloring the hair, but only during certain instances (like when there's not much volume). Here, I used both watercolor brush and the pencil tool. I was fighting the urge to play around with strands, but the want to add those little details won out.

Toward the end, I found that the colors looked too flat. I ended up darkening a lot of areas and emphasizing highlights. I also fixed the chin, because it was too pointy it made me cringe.

The shadows were drawn with black 100% opacity watercolor brush on a 43% opacity layer. Some edges were blurred for some, er, effect? Hahaha. I suck at describing/storytelling, I'm so sorry.

Details

Device: Samsung Galaxy Note 10+
Apps:
- MediBang Paint for Android
Brushes: watercolor (at varying opacity settings); pencil (100% opacity); blur

Notes

I finished watching the Korean drama It's Okay to Not Be Okay on Netflix, and my heart feels so light, I'm crying. The story (and fairy tales in it) was so beautiful, and the actors did really well. I wouldn't mind re-watching the series. <3

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