Lilith

As someone who works a full time job and tries to paint multiple things simultaneously to not burn out and maximise enjoyment of painting projects, being able to paint pieces that ultimately fulfill multiple purposes without compromising any one of them, is peak satisfaction!

This bust was one such examples for me!

Not only was it this years pride painting project, which I paint and give away to a lucky winner to benefit the Trevor project as main prize, I was also able to fully dedicate it to two separate painting challenges! The amazing Glow Mode challenge here on baselair as well as the "Demonic" monthly challenge run by GitGud in their community discord server. Since 'glow mode' refers to "how" to paint something and 'demonic' refers to "what" to paint (in my case).

The original idea was to paint the amazing Lilith bust from Pedro Fernandez Studio, which I had bought almost two years ago and never got around to, in darkness, while only lit up by a super bright light source coming in from one side that inherets a full half of the pride flag - for which I chose the Pink-Purple-Blue-Green color transition.

After the first two of the three sessions I could feasibly dedicate to it this month were done, I was made aware of one big issue, that I had felt but not accepted all this time. Purple/Violet simply can't deliver the amount of glow and luminosity the other three colors can. So if I wanted the full multi-colored osl to work and actually look powerful and cool, I would always end up with a dip at the purple part, that made it look like a break from the osl or like two instead of one source. So I adapted and decided to remove the purple from my imaginary source - while still using it for blending into terminus lines or shadows! - and focussed on the three remaining colored light sources while also deciding to spread them out. Pink would hit from the front and well above, blue from the slightly below left and green would be quite near and positioned a lot more below, while also wrapping around a little to impact the back side to some extend.

With that I was able to also improve the lighting for her right shoulder, especially the scale mail nmm, which would have suffered in low lighting, by ending up quite uninteresting, as well as the hip decor, where the tiny pearl chains would now have fancy looking speculars from all three different angles and colors!

I'm super happy I made that change and will try to remember this lesson.

Considering I only had three saturdays to paint this and was slowed down by the wheel spins we did for every single donation to charity, I believe to have ended up with a pretty awesome result. I'm proud of and happy with it and looking forward to seeing how it does in the challenges as well as seeing it finding a new home with whoever wins the big charity giveaway.