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.
