Unmasked in progress

Here's the latest update to the dress sketch. I'm taking it slow, heh. Still have the background and secondary characters to sketch out. Over the weekend I checked out some different materials for the main character to figure out what fabrics will best give me the colors that I want to have in the final piece, too. When I started this illo, I decided to use a kind of visual story or metaphor of the character being revealed in the illustration (since it's also part of the relaunch of my website), hence the mask being moved over to the side. Not happy just yet with how I've sketched it, but it's a decent start. I probably will do a separate sketch of the mask on another sheet before I'm happy. Although it may actually all get painted over (digitally) when I'm working on the color final.

The final leaf design of the summer mask will be based on some rather large leaves by a river in a London park from a photo that I took when I was visiting London one summer. Here's one of the leaf photos I'm using as my reference. Believe it or not, the leaves are at least a foot if not 2 feet across. Those are ducks down below in the water.

I've already picked my palette (lots of lovely summer greens with secondary gold and brown colors and accents of some of my other favorites) which is definitely helping pull this illustration story out of my head onto my sketchpad. This one will be finished over the weekend, and I will post the final version when it's done. :)

Meant to add...I've been wanting to do an illustration like this for some time. One of the inspirations for it has been a long time favorite artist of mine, Adrienne Segur, from waaaay back when I was in 2nd grade, believe it or not. I was so enthralled by the Fairy Tales that she'd illustrated...that I checked out the book so much from the school library that I got in trouble. :( It was fun to find a bit more info about this artist this weekend as well as read an interesting article by some other favorite writers and artists of mine over at the Endicott Studios.