Final painting and tutorial

Sorry I've been a bit absent from the web, but my friend has been in town for the last week, so I was a bit preoccupied. However, I did manage to work on that painting this week and wanted to post up the process pictures I mentioned. Here's the completed painting and then the progress pictures. Enjoy!

Here's the preliminary sketch. I changed the hair a bit from the original in my sketchbook. I wanted to try something a little different.



Acrylic wash or my primary color. Here I started defining the facial features.



More detail.



Traced the hair to transfer it to the decorative paper I'll be using.



Using my elementary school skills to transfer the design onto the back of the paper so I can cut it out. I usually define the segments a bit here for large blocks of hair.



Putting down the first layer of paper. As you can see, they are large basic shapes that will get modified with either paint or more layers of paper.



After the paper was in place, I made some changes to the painting so that the flow was a little more consistent. I removed a couple of pieces that I didn't feel was working. I also added some non-painted pieces of paper on top to give the hair a little more depth.