Yokan

I had a beautiful reference to draw from here. I was first captivated by the hair style of the model in this pose, and the way her body shape was shown more through he flow of the beads on her skin. Sadly due to the very soft tones used in the drawing the image does not scan very well and I had to adjust the contrast quite a bit in the image here.

As usual I started with the easy grid method. This stage took quite a long time as I was distracted and there were a lot of bead details to get right.

The hair was built up with lots of long strokes over a few sessions, which I forgot to scan as I was enjoying the drawing too much.

The bun and loose hairs at the back helped to give some life to the hair style and framed the shape of the head.

From the back of the hair, the ear was the next natural area to tone in, and was the only area of mid tones on the head apart from the lips.

The nose had only some slight tone on the bottom to help give it some volume and then the full lips were filled in slowly going with the direction of the skin. I normally enjoy drawing lips and this was no exception. I kept coming  back to the lips during this project to add more tone in small areas.

Next I added all the light tones to the rest of the body. This allowed me to remove much of the original line work as I wanted only to have a very soft hint of the edges of the figure where needed.

The beads were added in stages, along with the soft shadows they cast when they came into contact with  the models skin.

The line of beads across the models back helps to show where here far shoulder is and hints at the curve or her back. The density of these beads seems to be due to the way they are draped round.

The string of beads round the back of the model was out of focus in the reference image and so was rendered here with very little highlights. The beads from the crook of her left arm however were given highlights and the darker shadow they cast on her arm.

Then I went over the whole image to adjust the contrast while trying to keep the over exposed light of her skin.

As you can see from this scan the soft tones were not picked up well by the scanner and were still hard to see even after normal contract adjustments for the scan. But I am very please with the final original image.