Collaboration with Stephanie Allison

Stephanie Allison and I have decided to do a fun little collaboration.  We each are going to paint half a canvas and then mail it to the other one to finish the other half.  I started on an 11x14 canvas panel and thought I would give you all a step by step look at how it evolves.  After I send it off to Stephanie she is going to do the same at her blog, so be sure to follow the whole progression over there.
I often post a few wips of my work over on my Facebook page, but rarely do I remember to take photos at every step.  Since this one was a small quick piece I tried to stop myself and take some photos.  I wanted to especially show you how much I often struggle to get the perfect skin tone and hair color on my girls.  Unfortunately with me, it is often just guesss work and not really an exact science.  So here we go:

The beginning sketch above.  With a quick wash of ultramarine blue below (after I sprayed it with a light layer of workable fixative).

When I first start adding skin tones they can look a mess for awhile.  Adding fixative over the canvas makes the first layers of paint not stick so well too.  I have to lay down a lot of thin layers early on and let them each dry.  At first they can look a mess for awhile, but I try my best to add the shadows and dark areas first.

Below I am adding in the darks of her hair.  I am trying to figure out where to go with her skin tone.  She is a little too pink and pasty at this point.

I think I want to go blonde, but it does not look good with her skin tone.

So I added some orangey tones to her skin and decided to go dark with the hair.  Had to add a mask too.

Getting close to done now.  Just got to add the peacock details.

And here is she is all done...well at least my side.  I kind of hogged a little more than half, I hope Stephanie doesn't get annoyed with me!

Dragonfly WIP

This is a very rough sketch to the piece I am currently working on. I am almost done with her now and she looks a little different than this sketch, but this gives you a rough idea as to what she will look like. I am working on refining my style. Being the Libra that I am, my art often reflects my indecisiveness. Sometimes I only want to do highly spiritual, symbolic, and mystical art and other times I just want to paint big eyed girlies. I am noticing that the artists that I am the most drawn to all fall under the catagory of Pop Surrealism. I like the idea of slightly distorting reality, and focussing on our vanity and messed up self-image constructs.
A friend of mine showed me this link It is for a Digital Retouch website that shows before and after shots of all the models. It is amazing how much they do to give us a false view of what beauty is. I guess that is what I want to explore. How beauty can be seen in the absurd and how we can easily distort our vision of beauty.
I think even the big eyed girlies can be spiritual art. With my work it is the eyes that convey the story of each soul I paint. They look back at you and hopefully speak to you. At least that is what I hope they do. Anyway, that is what I am wanting to paint for now. I could change my mind tomorrow.