adele painting process

my first assignment in my materials and techniques 2 class was to do a portrait of a music artist. i chose adele. i was able to scan my painting a few times to show some sort of process.

this was the tight sketch done in pencil. it took me a while to get it to look like adele. but i'm proud that i did finally make it look like her. 

i inked it with microns. we had to use ink that was waterproof since we were going to paint it with watercolor. microns worked really well with this. i started laying down some watercolor in the background. i still was iffy about what colors i was going to use in the piece. so i didn't do a lot of painting in class that day.

i layed down some watercolor everywhere. again the mircons worked well with this. they did not smudge or fade when i was painting with the watercolor. i added some warm colors to the smoke in the background to kind of make it pop a bit. it looked kind of boring without them. i was afraid that by doing that it was going to take some attention from adele, but i only used a bit of the warm colors in the smoke. so it worked out.

here's the final piece...before critique (i have critique today). i added more to her makeup to the best of my ability. and i added some highlights to her lips with some white fluid acrylic paint. i feel that my professor will want me to work on the face more. but i really like it like this. adele's skin always looks soft to me so that's why i want to leave it like this. but overall i really like the way this came out. it's nice to make school work you actually like in the end.