annathecrow's fanart

Portrait of Satine Kryze, Duchess of Mandalore. She wears a complicated headdress with white flowers and large blue earrings.

SW: Satine Kryze

(on AO3)

Technique: gouache

I spent a lot of time thinking about Satine's costume when I wrote Grace and Glory, and I came out of it with an unexpected appreciation for it and her visual style in general - especially when I started sketching it. It's just so much fun to draw and paint. It's very elegant and dramatic, I love all the angles.

Art notes

I picked up gouache very recently and I'm enjoying it quite a bit, although I suspect I'm doing it all wrong. I like that it's more permissive than watercolors, that I can go over a part multiple times before it gets hopelessly muddy.

This painting has fairly realistic skin colors, but I enjoy using stylized colors for humans and gouache works great for that:

Gouache painting of a woman's face. The skin is painted in shades of orange and purple.

I'd like to try this in fanart as well. It's a bit of a fight, though, when you're trying to get the likeness and keep to a color palette at the same time. (You'd think it wouldn't be so hard, given that "color palette" in trad media mean a literal palette, but alas.)