This man

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I came close to ruining this, but I brought it back from the brink with gouache and color pencils 👌 My issue was that simply rendering it felt not "enough," I wanted to experiment more and have something more abstracted, but most of that just made a mess (which was mostly fixable).

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Namely, I tried adding lots of gouache with a brayer, which was an interesting effect, but wrong for this illustration. I'll save that idea for another piece, I think. (I used water-based gouache so I was able to scrub most of it off afterwards and take the image back to its watercolor base layer).

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I still feel like it's missing something. 🤔 I'm finding lately I want both soft edges and crisp silhouettes, a lush soft fullness but also strong negative space, to obliterate the sketch beneath layers of flowing color but also have a clean read. A difficult balance, and this doesn't achieve it.

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I still think it looks okay! But "looks okay" and "achieves what I want" are different things, and even if this isn't quite there, it's still a stepping stone towards something and a learning opportunity. If nothing else I'm pleased I didn't have to scrap it (as I have with other pieces).

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