Severed head

The last illustration of my book will be of a severed doll head. It took me a few tries to get this right and below you can see the transition.

The first painting took me very little time a tall and at first I was satisfied with it, but soon realised it could be improved upon. The red scarf is featured in all the illustrations of the Vizier’s daughter, but I decided to make it mean more in the second illustration. Here the scarf represents the blood that the doll does not have. I wanted the image to have a gory feel to it as the scene comes across in the book, but had to find a way around this. The scarf worked perfectly to achieve this. The pattern of the dots allows for views to question if this is blood or something else.

I like the style and ideas within the second illustration but felt the hair strands were too thick and came across rather like dread locks and could make the viewer confused about the identity of the head. I decided the best way to solved this was to repaint the head larger in order to make the strands look smaller.

I think the chunky, thick looking hair helps give the head a fake feel, as in, it helps make the head look more like a doll. As does the white eyes and smiling lips.

Technically, this was a difficult piece to paint. The hair strands were very fiddle-y and its difficult to gain the flat watercolour on such a large surface area especially navigating in-between small strands of hair at the same time.