WATER LILY - Inktober 2017 REDRAW

Hi lovely peeps, 

I've taken a short break from the 3 big pieces I have been sharing with you in previous posts to do a little ink work in advance of Inktober.

I don't plan on doing Inktober next month, this year has been really tough as it is, and I don't have the resilience for such a challenge this time round, but I do love and miss ink, so I thought I'd do something adjacent. 

I will be doing a throwback of all my past inktober drawings for each day of October on social media, so I figured I would lean into that and do a redraw of some of my 2017 Inktober drawings, the series that started it all for me. 

I did do a redraw a couple of years back, but I didn't really feel 100% happy with it, so I wanted to try again, with a different drawing. 

Choosing was difficult!
But here is the piece I chose to recreate :

It was day 14 of the series.
And here is the redraw, WATER LILY !

Here they are next to each other :

And here is what I changed, what I kept, and why!

✤ What I kept : 

- My beloved black background for the water, because why wouldn't I put myself through 4 hours of inking tiny little gaps between a confusing, migraine-inducing tangle of roots? Hours of fun.
- The frontal composition : I always liked the POV of the original piece, and was keen to not change too much about the composition, as I wanted to be able to clearly see any improvements I may bring to it, and keeping the main element (the composition) the same, helps in that respect. 

✤ What I changed :

- The mood and general atmosphere : A qualm I always had with the 2017 drawing was how dark it was in mood. Because of my inexperience and also the speed at which I had to create it, a lot of the choices I made make the person look more like a dead body than I was intending. The hatching on the body makes it look quite gaunt, and while I do like the parallel between the position of the arms and the hair floating on the surface above, there is something a little too...crucifixion about it, if you know what I mean?
So something I strove for in the new piece was more life, and more levity.
I added more movement to the character, with the hand wrapping around the stem of the lily bud, I added clothes to emphasize the floatyness and ethereal quality of the underwater world, and I stayed away from adding too much texture to the skin, so as to make the character look less like it had been wasting away.
I also added life to the surface, with the lily pads and buds, and the light play on the surface and the body, linking the two realms with beauty and light, rather than darkness and turmoil.
- The top-bottom divide : In the original piece, there are 3 segments to the image : the sky, in which the flower blooms, the water, where the face surfaces, and the underwater, that takes up most of the image. This division is a little clunky and awkward, and makes each element of the piece  too divided and separate from each other.
In the new piece, I opted for 2 distincts environments : above the surface, and under the surface. With that new layout, the emphasis is on the character and the flower, and how they link both world together. The relationship of the two worlds,  and narrative journey of the eye make more sense.
- A better defined value range and textural range :
Something I have definitely learned a lot about since 2017, is value.
I really wanted to have a better value distribution in the new piece, so worked on it on Procreate after I had painted the black water. I was keen to try things out before jumping into painting them, and I am very glad I did, as it helped a lot. 

Here's the value study I did in Procreate :

Ans that's it for this one! 

This drawing will become the cover for my 2023 calendar, so I should be nearly done with the design process for that, and I will share the pages with you in another post soon.

I hope you enjoyed this little breakdown, and that you are all well!

Take good care,
Stay tuned for a Daily Doodle Diary batch tomorrow,
All my love, M