Beauty Inside Art

During the month of June, I sort of rediscovered my love for drawing and painting. After drawing a few realistic sketches of eyes, hands, objects, I decided I wanted to try and create something that could be more on the illustration side. Something not necessarily realistic, but intense, and this is the result. I had a reference photo for this, just for inspiration, and it looks absolutely nothing like the finished result. I'll give you a clue, I was looking at a still of Lydia in Teen Wolf. See, I told it looks nothing like her, and that's what I wanted. I didn't want to copy her face, no, I wanted to get inspiration from what she was feeling and her expression. I only used that reference photo for the first sketch you see above in my progress pictures. They were also posted on Instagram, as I was working, by the way.

After I got that rough sketch with Lydia's picture, I decided to clean it up a bit and leave just the final lines. Next, I coloured those outlines with Stabilo markers and then I used the Reeves Soft Pastels mixed with water to add colour. I had decided I wanted her to have purple hair and unnatural eyebrows, from the beginning. The rest was mainly improvisation. I love improvising, trying new methods, and pushing my materials in my art. The eyelashes were created with a size 0.3, black, waterproof Snowman Drawing Pen. Again, they add to the more surreal element of the illustration. Technically, it's not surreal at all, but I don't know what to call this type of drawing.

When I finished painting it, and adding the details like wrinkles and stuff, I scanned the A5 page and edited the drawing in Photoshop. I used some very simple effects and the results are shown in the final pictures. Some of them are pretty extreme, I know, but like I said, realism was not the point here. In addition, you can still see the paper, you can almost feel it and I like that.

You can buy the original drawing here or you can buy the one with the blue hair here. You could also buy the slightly altered version here or the black & white one here. If you're interested in the more dramatic black & white prints you buy them here or the one with the red lips here and the last one here.