Art: Oh, aching heart! (G if you are European, PG if you are American ;P)

I was about to give up on this one, really. I worked on it till two in the morning, and the result wasn't at all what I had wished it to be. Urgh. Sleep has become very precious to me, and I wasted it for a lousy picture! The problem was the blacks, which is a bit ... painful ... in a Snape picture. I really don't manage to mix a good black, and I didn't want to use an unmixed one because those always look a bit dull - and a dull black wouldn't have looked good next to Severus's luminous skin. When I finally went to sleep, Snape had blue-purple hair and blue-purple robes. It was a real pity, I thought, because my inks were good - I'd done them with a Faber-Castell brush pen, which I find more manageable than a real brush.

This morning I decided to pull a Marini. Okay, that sounds better than it looks - I'm *far from* a Marini :/. I only mean that I opted for suggesting black in a way that I have picked up from Marini's art for Le Scorpion. I probably did it backwards, though. It's probable that Marini inks first and then adds watercolour; in this case I painted first and added ink afterwards :-).

The result is okay, but I'm not sure it's entirely what it could have been. Maybe I'll end up doing another version...?




( Oh, aching heart! )