After Atong

I'm in love with this new face I drew after a glimpse of the image in my head while in the bathroom. it's funny how these vivid inspirations happen with me, I wonder how it is for other artists? I saw the whole design and layout of the piece in its totality, and there's a rush to put it to pixel so I don't forget it. Problem is, when you start to draw, the process is about reacting to the marks you have placed and each mark elicits a new response. So it's always inevitable that the original vision would shift.

For me, the eureka moment is that I've been wondering how best to render the African models' faces, and it dawned on me that the way I did it here, a solid matte base with highlights painted in, was probably the way to go. For my fashion illustrations, I've been doing it the way I draw Caucasians, building up shadows to create volume and depth. Doing that with African features however, has resulted in often unweildy layers of transparency, and trying to navigate all the color layering.

I drew this from my head, but later googled photos of model Atong to see how the highlights would form properly. I didn't actually find an angle like this so I was testing my spatial relations senses by looking at various other angles, and extrapolating the lighting from there. I'm rather proud of having been able to do that here.