The girl with pigtails

Here is another try with the trace and watercolour painting technique that I explained a few days ago.

This time I did the stretching beforehand. Stretching is useful to prevent your paper from buckling when you paint with watercolours. The process isn't too complicated: wet your paper with a sponge or a paint roller and wait for about 10 minutes. Your paper will expand. Then, use gummed craft paper tape to fix the wet paper to a board. The gum in the paper tape is activated by water. Make sure you use a thick board that doesn't bend easily. Finally, wait 24 hours for the paper to dry and stretch. Check out this video if you have any doubts.

You want to use an application for extracting the major lines from the photo you are about to trace. For example, you can use the pencil sketch effect from the tool Paint.net. Print the result and trace it into your watercolour paper with a pen. I always use a red pen because it makes it easier to see what lines I've already traced.

This time I skipped the grayscale layer and applied colour directly. I started with the lighter tones and then progressively I applied darker ones.

This is the final result. I'm not satisfied yet, but I learned a few things. For example, I think that next time I should try to simplify the tracing part. Note that I cheated and removed a few tracing marks from her face with the computer.