The hair is still not ready, but I decided to leave it for a while and continue with her face instead. The eyes are almost done and right now I’m working on the shading in her face.

Her lips are really hard to paint, mainly because they are a bit asymmetrical. The shape of the two sides of the upper lip is very different and it looks as if I’ve painted her mouth being blindfolded :p That is however not the case. I’ll post the reference photo later on when I’m done with this and you’ll see what I mean :p

Back in the days of the 1930′s, photography was somewhat of a science and portraits like these required the model to sit very still for quite some time while the photographer used a LOT of light to achieve the photo in the first place. This in return, meant that when the photo was finally done, whatever make-up the model had on would have faded away in the bright light.
Most of the time they exaggerated the make-up to make up for the light, but certain things would “vanish” anyway, like eye lashes. It happened that the model/actress had fake eyelashes on, which made a bit of a difference for the end result. But most of the time they did retouch the photos to apply eyelashes and lipstick, among other things.

The eyelashes that Jean Harlow have in this reference photo are very exaggerated and was painted on later. Not exactly the kind of Photoshopping we can do today, but I guess you could say it was the base for what we have today. However, the retouching we’re doing today is way out of bounds and far from the added details they used to do back then.

So, I’ve painted eyelashes on one of her eyes so far…just to see what it looks like. Because she’s looking up at the camera with her head slightly bent down, her natural eyelashes would have been almost entirely hidden. And the lower lashes are way too long for it to look good. So I’m pondering if I should make them more natural or not.

That said, a part of the 1930′s was this typical silent movie look…dark around the eyes, long eyelashes and very dark lips. So I might stick to it…we’ll see.

There will be more of this tomorrow in any case. At least I think I will shut it down for today :)

Oh…and if any of you are following me on my page at Facebook….I can’t upload anything to the gallery in there tonight. Not sure why, but it looks like they ran out of glue :p So I will try tomorrow again.

Have a great evening :)