100 Palette Challenge // Palette #5 // Cheveux Rouge by @3ofpents

What's this?! Not only did I get a second challenge piece in this week, I got a THIRD one in, and on the same day! Holy schnikes!

This palette is from a really really cool ad for a furnishing company in 1904. It's very Klimpt but make it art deco. I think it's Russian? But I don't know the alphabet well enough to recognize it for sure.

Honestly? I saw that pale peach and the dark blue and was like, "Ah! My chance to try out that Toulouse Lautrec style has come!"

Even the orange was part of the inspiration, really. My mom had a print of Lautrec's Jane Avril painting hanging up in the staircase of the house I grew up in and lived in for almost 30 years and the orange is so prominent in that piece I honestly forgot there was any yellow in it until I looked it up just now to link to it. So this piece was sort of roughly inspired by my decade old memories of that piece.

I had so much fun drawing this piece, though. I got to revisit the curly hair technique I learned from drawing Dan Mora's Aqualad. And it helped me refine a style that I kind of perfected in online pictionary games but just couldn't quite figure out how to translate it to actually drawing a finished piece. Thinking of it in terms of Toulouse Lautrec's style really helped, and I think I could stand to be even more loose with my line work.

There's always room for improvement, but I really love how this came out.

Oh, I also want to give a shoutout to Fat Photo Ref, which I utilized for this piece. If you're looking to learn how to draw larger bodies or even just diversify the bodies you draw, I highly recommend FPR. They have tons of pose references from tons of folks with different body types and shapes. They're all tagged by things pose, level of clothed, type of clothing, gender presentation, actions, so you can easily search by whatever reference you're specifically looking for.

You do have to apply to get access to the archive, but it's completely free. They're just trying to protect their models by making sure you're a real person with a genuine interest in the resource (the internet can be a hostile place to fat folks). Skill level and seriousness as An Artist do not factor into it at all, and they say as much on the google form application.

And, like I said, it's a fantastic resource.