+ Divine Grace +

Hi again! This will be another one of those quick gallery updates. I'm on a holiday at the moment and I'm trying to do all final edits to that novel of mine, so I can then pass it to the test readers as soon as possible. The novel was supposed to be finished at last Christmas, so I'm little bit behind the schedule...

Anyway, about the painting here. This is actually the main character from my first novel, called Grace, and it's a re-painting of an old piece of her that I did for the book's promotional materials. She’s a mage, specifically a healer and a seeker (she can find lost and hidden things. That goes for the other people’s memories too). But there’s something that sets her apart from other mages, as miracles seem to follow her where ever she goes, like her very presence haves the way of bringing magic into surface of anything around her. In the book she had black hair, but I always thought she should’ve been blonde ^^

This painting had a huge impact to me as an artist, as it almost made me completely quit painting. It was the last artwork I was going to do for the "Pahan juuret"-novel, and it was supposed to be brilliant, better than any of the drawings and paintings I had done before it, a true masterpiece. But after the piece was finished I slowly realized that it wasn't nearly as good as it was supposed to be, that I wasn't nearly as good as an artist that I wanted to be, that I should have been by then. It was very painful to come to terms with that realization, and it took me a long time to get pass the disappointed and the feeling of being worthless. Half a year exactly, and in that time I didn't do a single artwork.
But art haves it's ways to sneak back to artists lives. I started photographing because I just didn't have anything better to do. First it was just something to get me out from my home, but it didn't take long for me to understand that it was actually quite fun, and more importantly, I wasn't actually that bad at it. And then I was asked to do a commission (the client had to almost force me into it because I wasn't that comfortable on painting anything anymore). The job wasn't anything major, but nonetheless it was a success, as both the client and I were happy with what I had done. Though the best thing about that commission, was that it got me to paint again. Before I knew it I was once again writing a fantasy themed novel and creating artworks for it, and that’s the road I’m still walking on.
Now after three years of hard work my second novel is almost finished (at least the writing part of it...) and I finally feel that "I'm worth it" to do all this. So repainting this image was very personal thing for me to do. First it felt really intimidating ("what if I still can't get it right"), but it was also something that I felt that I had to do to get it off my system. So is the new version of this image what the original was supposed to be? No, not really. A true masterpiece? Definitely not. But it's good enough. What I learned from all this is that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. You can't order a true masterpiece to come. They come if they are to come, and it's better not to use my time longing for them and just create art instead.

Face close-up: fav.me/d2th1pc

Edit: I worked a little more with the textures and some minor details.