Pinker than Shepherd's Delight

I sat down with my watercolours today and I had a bloody good time. Throughout my course I never really had the time available to sit and pour hours into getting to grips with the medium, and if you happen to have followed me over the last three years you'll have noticed a trend in me pulling out my paints every summer and attempting a portrait. I find it oddly exciting and relaxing to just sit and paint 'properly', so for me it's kind of cathartic to sit down in the summer at the end of a busy academic year and just pour some time into something that yields no reward, but just brings me a little bit of joy.

If you follow me you'll probably also notice a trend in me forever drawing myself, and I think it's because there's never any fear of offending myself with my interpretations. Today I attempted to paint Marina and the Diamonds, and I can't say I did her much justice. Colour and technique wise I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out, but as ever, I can never get faces right when it comes to drawing someone. I suppose it's all just practice, though.

Watercolours are a medium that I have a love/hate relationship with and I'm also not great at working with colour, so i thought I'd challenge myself to paint something all in watercolour with a somewhat unusual colour palette. Marina's photography for her FROOT album uses neon lighting to highlight her which yields some pretty stunning results, so I decided to give recreating it a go. 

I love the colours. Because of the neon lights, I was pushed to really look for the colours in the image as opposed to just using typical skin colours, and I found I really had fun using oranges, pinks and blues to pick out all of her features. Heck, i'm even happy with how I painted the hair, and that's a first for me. As I said, it's a shame that the drawing itself doesn't bare a close resemblance to Marina, but I think other than that I didn't do too badly today. I'm thinking I might challenge myself to do a few oddly coloured portraits while I stay with my dad in Germany over the next couple of weeks, but as ever, we'll see!

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