On a whim

It was almost midnight. 

I should be climbing into my bed.  Not because I was afraid to turn into a pumpkin, but I just wanted to have a good showing on my Apple Health app to say that I had healthy sleep habits.

But I'm a night owl.  Somehow I was reluctant to let the day go.  So I continued to scroll through songs on my music streaming device.  Any excuse to clutch the waning day. 

Then an album cover turned up, a lady's headshot.

For some reason I was so enamored with her image, I had to paint her; immediately.

Perhaps I had been studying Xu Beihong and his studies with sketching and what not, I instinctively grabbed my charcoal and started to sketch on Xuan paper.  I filled in the grayscale values with my brush wash which I didn’t empty from the day before, which was basically very diluted ink.  Her hair reminded me of the tail and mane on a horse, brushstroke-wise.  I had no training per se in painting portraits but that didn't stop me.  I was on a whim.

By the time the painting was done, it was already a new day.   I just left the painting as it was and went to bed satisfied, like a child having received a new toy.

I decided to take a closer look at what I had done the night before.  I examined it in the daylight.

 

That's when I realized that her nose was too flat and one of her nostril seemed to have collapsed.  Her eyebrows were not symmetrical.  Her mouth was off center or I should say that she had more lips on one side than the other.

I tried to rescue or hide my mistakes by draping her hair closer t the face to conceal the brow and lip, and re-shaping one of her nostrils.

Since my iPad came with certain artistic brushstrokes, I thought I gave it a try.

Combed her hair a bit, less wild, and a backlit highlight effect, 

That was actually fun.  I was on a wimp.