Try something different

Sometimes you just have to loosen up and try something different.

I watched a preview of one of Dina Wakley's videos last week. It was only a few minutes long, but inspiring. She was encouraging artists to use different implements for painting, and in the snippet of video she used a chopstick.

I didn't have a chopstick to hand, so used the 'wrong' end of a paintbrush instead.  It didn't absorb a lot of paint, so I ended up making a lot of short strokes and then going back through the previous ones trying to join them up. That's why there are lines within the paint lines. However, it made me not worry so much about whether it looked good or not because there was less control than with the 'right' end of the brush. Sometimes using a different tool allows you to loosen up because you lower your expectations when you are doing something you're not used to.

I filled in the irises and lips with a brush and put more colour in the hair with a colour shaper