naked boobs, blood, not knowing when to stop, or "How To Ruin A Piece Of Art You're Proud Of"

OK.

so here's the journey of my latest piece, which was supposed to be another entry to the tata gala art show. I've worked on it for several nights, and after all of the work, I think I've ruined it. Or at least I don't really like it anymore. Maybe the internet can convince me otherwise. I just am still not entirely sure what happened.

So here's the inspiration: An adorable and well endowed model making a nice over the shoulder look. (censored nips so blogger doesn't mark this page as porn).

The idea I wanted to go for was to make her shine somewhat while covered in darkness. Maybe even have it so there was light behind her. I wanted to do it with purples and reds. Something like this:

Way too dark, but you get the idea. Easy to do in photoshop in 5 minutes, and most likely impossible to do with paper, pencils, and watercolors.

I did my thing where I draw the basic figure and basic "here's where eyes go, here's where a nose goes" and then ignore the picture and draw my own person so it's not a total copy. It went ok.

I love the innocent look of worry. I also like her more without finished hair- the fake hoodie look is hot. If I could go back in time, she'd be wearing a hoodie and it would just be a sketch. Oops.

Then I made hair and the body.

Oh look, naked boob. I spent forever on shading and trying to get the right amount of shadow and subtle highlights. Her back could be better, but I knew it would be covered up by paint at some point, so I didn't worry.

Then I did some splatterings, which I love.

And then I ruined it. I started covering the rest of it with random splotches and splatters of purple and red combinations, then threw dirty water at it like no tomorrow. I got a solid base of mess all over it, but was beginning to see the problem with trying to make it darker. I usually am pretty good at understanding how much water I am using vs. how much paint vs. how dirty the water is. I got scared about how dark everything looked, but knew everything got lighter when it dried. I kept going, and frankly, I blew it. I was dealing with way more red than I realized, and more importantly, way more paint.

See? I'm basically painting with blood. And yes, this was my set up- 2 feet of space and balancing the paper against my imac, using paper towels to collect the paint. Smart. So here's my pretty picture completely covered in blood.

I love the gore on the right- the way the reds dripped and dried rules. But this wasn't how this piece was supposed to go. And as you can see, I lost nearly all of my detail in this gigantic mistake. Broken hearted, I went to bed not knowing what to do. I don't have a good picture of it when it dried, but it dried less red and I painted some subtle yellow around her face with some very subtle reflection splatters on her arm to try to show some light behind her. Unfortunately, I was dealing with so much paint, I wasn't sure what to do.

I decided that even though the idea of this was to mix pencils and paint and leave things subtle (i.e. not use pens or paint to draw over the original drawing), I had to ink it just to bring her back out of the blood mess. And somehow, she lost her character.

I put lots of detail into her face, and then left the rest pretty untouched. That way, her body kind of blends into the paint and mess and hopefully your eye is drawn to her face rather than her boob or back. But somehow, everything still kind of blends in. For some reason, no matter what angle I look at this from, its just very vague and its hard to catch anything.

This is a fairly accurate representation using my camera and some color correction in photoshop.

So, I'm kind of lost. I don't know what to do. My mind is telling me that I lost, that I didn't do what I wanted to do, so either put it away forever, or maybe start splattering black all over the left side of the piece and maybe some lighter stuff towards the right. I ruined a piece years ago and just flipped out on it, splattering black everywhere and making it a complete mess, and although I still don't really love it, a lot of other people have.

This was done on watercolor paper though, which is much easier to make dark messes on, and much easier to "ruin" a piece on and have it still look neat. I really don't know what to do. I clearly need to make it darker somehow, but it just makes me real sad that I lost all of the detail I spent hours on. I guess they can't all be winners.

Thoughts?

currently listening to: Titanic, Signs, Independence Day soundtracks