Fairies again

I'm revisiting my series of fairies I did originally for my trip to Angouleme, France. I wasn't planning to sell them for much so I didn't put a lot of time into doing them. They were all India ink on watercolor paper with a few washes of gouache. I guess in the back of my head I considered them preliminaries for a more focused painting either in gouache or oils. I guess I would consider most paintings preliminaries until they are made in oil. It's only recently that I've been comfortable considering gouache on the same level of oil painting. I've worked in gouache for years for my illustration assignments and they were all finished illustrations. It's interesting that I took this long to come to this position about the medium making the definitive vision of the art.

I went in to the fairies again with the intent to make finished looking art. So far I'm pretty happy with the results. The blue fairy is resisting my attempts to finish it but I will get it. People on my news letter got to see these first.

I changed some of the structure in this one. I wasn't crazy o the proportions of the first version. Still torn between treating the green hair as a flat green shape or trying to give it volume. I need to resolve the eye also.