Illustration... Colored Pencil Magazine art challenge

Meow there, Monday!   This is my entry for Colored Pencil Magazine's online art challenge for November.  And finally, a portrait photo again!  Been waiting for a portrait art challenge since the last one several months ago.  The succeeding challenge photos were really nice but I prefer doing portraits or anything human-y figure-y...  This is my second attempt for this challenge, didn't quite like the first one I did.

Couldn't quite get the colors to look like the original illustration after scanning.  Anyway, it's rendered with watercolor pencils on a 9" x 12" Canson watercolor paper.  Trimmed a bit to fit the scanner.  Adjusted the color/brightness/contrast on Photoshop.  Below is the art challenge photo by Sally Ford.  As usual, we are free to do our own interpretation of the original photo.  I choose to do mine in color, as my selection of grey colors are pretty limited.  I don't normally do colored portraits, so this piece was a bit of a challenge... but it was a lot of fun!  Will certainly be doing more of there colored portraits!  Fun!

Now, for the process/WIP pics... Just some of the in-progress pics.  My style is that of render-and-wash technique.  I wanted the final piece to look soft, but slightly "textured" and a bit like an old photo...

Some greys and wash to tone down the final colors.

Some more grey and then the browns and wash...

Building up the layers...

Kept repeating this until I got the color intensity I liked...

Working on the details... 

Almost done!  

And this beautiful and inspiring song accompanied me while I did this piece... 

Hontou no Oto by Kokia, one of my fave singers!

Youtube, where is that auto-replay button?!

Yeah, looooooong post!  Please browse through the other portraits I've done too, clicky-click (here)...  If you like the song by Kokia, check out my portrait on Kokia, (here).  I've included some of my fave Kokia songs in that too.  Thanks for reading through this looooooooong post of mine!  =^.^=

Illustration... Wavy hair

Meow, there!  Still practising on hair...  and still not quite sure how to go about it!  LOL...  I did two illustrations of the same hairstyle.  Love sketching long, wavy hair!

This is the 2nd version... the "neat" one...

wip of 2nd version...

1st version...

Messy...  although I'm liking the browns and the wavy, flowy hairstyle.  

wip of the 1st version...

The original hairstyle looks much nicer of course!  From the JJ fashion magazine, my fave!

Illustration... flowy hair

Meow there!  Got rather bored with doing fashion sketches... thought I'd do something different!  It looks a bit anime-ish, not exactly what I had in mind when I was rendering it.  I haven't really done much rendering on my illustrations/sketches, except for the sketches I've done for my blog.  So I ended up rendering it like my sketches.  Need to explore some new ways of rendering!  

 I love how things move underwater...  This illustration is inspired by that, although it also looks like it's windblown as well.  LOL...  Anyway, I just love underwater fashion photography... the way fabric and hair flow and sway.  So mesmerizingly graceful and elegant!   Oh yeah, RuPaul's Drag Race is partly to blame for this fascination with flowy/wavy hair.  The hairstyles in that show are fiercely fab!  

Some minor changes to the sketch I previously posted...

Base of watercolor and shading with watercolor pencils...

Some beautiful underwater fashion photography videos...