Afrodite

Last night I was watching a tutorial on drawing hair (I actually have a pretty good grip on that, but you never know when you might come across a new tip or trick that hasn't yet occurred to you) and it struck me that the hair in question was all very, very white-girl-ideal-type hair.  Like, long, and silky, and manageable.  And I'm pretty damn good at that kind of hair.  But.

But.

That is not the only hair in the world, not by a long shot.  And while yes, it's very easy to take hair like that and turn it into a decorative element, it seemed to me that there's no reason other textures couldn't also be decorative, if I spent as much time noodling with it as I had over long silken locks.  Which got me to thinking about how I'd played with wet-on-wet to do yesterday's hair, and how much I'd liked the effect I got with my clouds on Saturday, and I thought to myself, "I'll bet I could make a really gorgeous afro using that technique," and then it was stuck in my head so hard that I decided that's what I was going to try my hand at today.

And then there was a lot of careful consideration over what I wanted my black lady to be wearing, because exoticizing, etc, which brought me back around to a conversation with my boss (who is black) about how his community needs more awareness of black professionals (outside of the realms of sports/entertainment) so I thought to myself, "Hell, I'll put her in a suit," and I did.

Don't adjust your monitor: the photo is blurry.  But it gives you the idea of how the hair looked wet...

...vs dry.  So soft!  Such gorgeous texture!

I loved how her hair came out (very close to my vision- I can see how I'll tweak it next time), but when it came to the rest of her... well, once again my lack of patience bit me in the ass (turns out I do need to literally remove myself from my desk during drying-time, not just read-a-book-until-I-think-'it's fine...'), but I really think I managed to salvage it, in the end.  Except for her nose (it's killing me that the plane break ended up so much higher than I'd intended) but I'll cut me some slack.

And, obviously, I'll give it another try in the future.