Fairies

Portrait of Aftyn from the video “Sharing my fairies with you”. It’s a luminous and sweet, gentle video, although apparently there’s no good way for me to link it here. Anyway, I’ve cropped the framing on this to emphasize her as the subject.

The portrait comes on the heels of a little string of failures that got my confidence down. Some of it is that series of figure studies I’ve been doing — felt a little like I was backsliding there rather than growing. Then I had an idea for an original composition that I still want to do but proved to be beyond my current skill level. Three runs at it were all disasters that made me sick to look at them.

I struggled at first with this one too, likely because of those confidence issues. You’ll see in the process video my initial sketch is awful. Rather than give up, though, I refocused and started over with greater attention to the details. In retrospect the sketch still could have used work before starting the paint — note the eyes being out of scale with each other — but I was pretty happy with it at the time. About halfway through the first paint, I realized it needed fixing and broke out the adjustment tools. I’m pretty happy with the final result.