Improving a…
Last January, I started working on a painting of Clover using shojo illustrations as my inspiration. I studied and referenced several CLAMP paintings while working on it. After about a month of working on and off, I decided it was finished. I'm not sure what my thought process was in deciding I was done with it. I had finished the line work, the second pass of rendering, the background... Perhaps I was sick of looking at it and wanted to move onto something else. Either way, this is what it looked like in February when it was 'done.' It's pretty, and I like it. But even at the time, I knew it could be better. I knew that I my painting skill could go beyond the 'finished' state, but I stopped pushing myself. I'm not sure why. Several months, a couple paintings, and hundreds of sketches later, I started thinking about the techniques of the Renaissance master painters. I don't remember what lead to this train of thought, but it was a key point of discovery in my journey as an artist. The…