I Call This 'Indigen'

I love this painting and am so excited to share it with you all. I'm in no way a professional nor do I paint often, I just do whatever comes naturally. With this piece, i actually learned a lot about my painting style. Initially I thought that I was going to make a pop culture style of painting but it ended up representing so much more. I call this painting 'Indigen', meaning an indigenous person who was born in a particular place. I was inspired by the strong features and vibrant culture of the African people. I wanted to create something that represented my rich history and culture - that I wish I knew more about.

To create this painting I used:

A variety of medium and small brushes

Oil paint

Oil paint thinner

Paper plate for disposable palette

Blank Canvas

Paper towel

I started off sketching my painting with a standard no. 2 pencil - nothing fancy. The male was easy to draw as I had someone pictured in my head, but the female was more difficult. I actually searched for a picture of Lupita Nyongo - she's absolutely gorgeous.

As you can see I intended on painting a curly almost 40s inspired hair-do. Instead it turned into a frizzy fro with a shell head band.

I wanted this to also be transparent, leaving the complexion up to the looker. Instead of using browns, i used every color that I had. This wasn't easy considering the paint takes a month to dry. So, I had to do a lot of heavy overlapping, sometimes 5 and 6 times until I got it to my liking.

I used lighter and darker hues to represent shadows and highlights. I was initially against a black outline of the features, however it was needed to bring it together.

Let me know what you think! Thanks for looking.