A statue and a leaf.

This watercolour of a flute player is taken from a photograph by Steve Lyddon on the Paint my Photo site.  I just knew when I saw it that I would do a watercolour version of it.
I intend to redo this as some of the proportions are not just quite right, but the general idea is there.
My intention was to give the painting that 'fresco' look.  Steve has taken quite a few photographs of
statues and most of them look very appealing to an artist.

There were just three colours used in this project.  Turquoise, Indian red and Yellow Ochre.  For the marble-like tones on the face I used the turquoise with just a touch of Indian red to tone it down.  For the darker colours I did the opposite.  My Indian red had a touch of turquoise.  The yellow ochre was added near the end to warm up certain areas.

I didn't pre-draw any of this, which is a pity as the arms and hands didn't turn out the way I wanted.
Here is a picture of the painting taken about half way through.

I would have preferred to stop just after this stage, but this has been a worthwhile exercise.  Watch out for the new version on here soon.

Around about the same time,  I cut a silhouette profile of my granddaughter, Jessica, from a leaf.  

This was quite difficult as the cut tends to want to go along the grain of the leaf surface.  It probably 

isn't too good for my scissors either.  Here is the result below.