This was part of my Advanced Higher folio work, so was completed maybe 3 years ago now.

 

I used a few anatomy books to give me a more informed approach to painting nude - as I hadn't had any life drawing classes at that point in time. I lost count of how many stock photos of water I referred to for this as well. Water is notoriously hard to paint!

 

I think it's really important to inform my work with prior research and collate a series of images to refer back to when painting in such a freehand manner. It was really difficult to find images of water reflecting on human skin - at least to the effect I wanted to portray here so a lot of it was just guess work. At the time I was really pleased with this but looking back I can see some of it comes across as sketchy and a little thin in places - I was lazy when I painted her hands because I struggle so much with drawing them.

 

It's good to look back on old work and see how far I've come in the years since - however this does reflect a time when I painted digitally probably a bit more (ironic considering now I'm doing a uni course based on digital media production), and I can see that I was obviously a lot more comfortable with painting in photoshop in this image than I am in my more recent attempts.