Real-time painting video + sketch

Hi peeps, 

How are you all?
How did your holidays go?
I hope you are all feeling well and happy!
My christmas was lovely, and seeing my family is wonderful, especially my younger brother who had been away for 2 years travelling.

I have managed to work intermittently, so, as promised, here is a real-time video of one of my little portrait paintings from a few weeks ago.
If you like this one, I have 2 more I can upload in January also!

The video doesn’t have music or a voiceover as I am still at my family’s home in France, so my editing capabilities are quite limited, and I am still working around things, I hope that’s ok!

This portrait was made using the below image as a reference (found on Pinterest). 

I painted it entirely with watercolours, using pretty much the same colour the whole time (a mix of moon glow and violet iron oxide), with maybe a bit of Payne’s grey mixed in every so often to darken the darks.
It was painted in my Daler Rowney mixed media sketchbook, so the paper sustained the paint well, although just about. 

I love doing studies of portraits in harsh lighting, as I always learn a lot about light and shadow.
Working with light means trying to better understand texture, volumes, and shape. It also means gaining a better understanding of edges, soft and hard, light reflection, light colour and warmth, etc...
Painting in a sort of monochrome manner, as I did for this small portrait, also means being careful about value and making sure to really know where the light is lightest, and where the shadows are darkest.
This little piece was a fantastic exercise in understanding exactly how much light shapes what we see.
I hope you will like the video, do free to ask any question you might have in the comments on this post, and I’ll do my best to answer them!

And then below, you can find a little picture of a sketch I did on the plane last week also. 

For some reason, I always feel really comfortable drawing on the plane. Even without any references, like for the drawing below, sketching flows and feel easy and simple to do.
I was right at the back of the plane, in the last row, and I could hear the flight attendants commenting on the drawing, and saying how they’d love to be able to draw too, it was really sweet.
I have been thinking more and more about maybe one day working on my own comic book or graphic novel, and I occasionally like to explore more character and narrative driven compositions, and this sketch is exactly that. 

It’s a far away project, something I would only work on once I feel more comfortable drawing specific characters, and once I have studied how to build strong narratives and complex compositions.
However, I do already know that I would want my graphic novel to revolve around characters with hollow bodies or heads, and build a world that is heavily symbolic and explores our mental recesses and workings in a highly illustrated and imaged way. 

The sketch above, for example, is about an elder from a race of people who have trees growing out of their heads, caring for a younger boy who broke one of his branches. 

I did not set out to draw this when I started sketching on the plane, I literally just doodled and this came out of it, which is often how my drawings work. But I ended up becoming attached to the two characters, and I really enjoyed building this simple composition about a brief moment in their lives and relationship. 

I haven’t had much time to sit down and create lately, as I am visiting family, catching up with friends I only see once a year, working on videos I have to prepare for January, and trying to catch up on Tutorials and Process Videos.
This has made me realise that I want to focus on creating as much as possible in 2020, and I’l have an important update post very soon, to walk you through changes to my Patreon and how I want to proceed moving forward. 

In the meantime, I hope you are all really well!
I want to do a proper thank you post soon, as I really want to thank you all for your absolutely incredible support, but I want to do it right, so it might take me a couple of weeks, as doing it here in France is tricky. 

But I hope you all had a tremendous few weeks lately, and that your 2019 is ending on a lovely note, full of love and support and beauty. 

Thank you for everything,

Take very good care of yourselves, 

All my love, 

Myriam