I'm working on the "Rio and Karen hugging" figures.The photo that I'm working from was taken years ago. Karen had a different hairstyle then, which she doesn’t like now. So I asked her to have someone take photos of her current hairstyle with her head at the exact same angle as in the photo. That was a bit of a challenge and took several tries.
When I sent this in-progress pic to Karen she wrote back:
“Wow, my hair looks GREAT. Better than real life. GOOOOD Going!! Ha!!”
These are the colors I used for Karen’s silver hair. The white and pale grey you'd expect, but it's surprising all the ginger, mauve and grey-lavender I could see in that photo. The mauves are mostly where her skin was showing through the hair --- at the part, and where strands of hair overhung her forehead.
The top photo was taken with my phone in the studio while working. Phone cameras don't really capture the nuances of color in artwork. Below is a high-quality scan of the actual artwork I made after I finished Karen's face and shirt. This is a better example of all the colors I used to create her hairdo. I'll talk about the underpainting of the purple shirt and the problems with purple pencils, in my next Blog post.
