The Jewel of Africa-update to the Right Combination

This is an update on my last post of "The Right Combination". I am considering what jewels to place on the portrait study.

Recreating an image I had viewed many years ago, I am having difficulty with imagining the exact jewels I had originally seen in the photograph. So over the past few days I've been conducting a little research. I've discovered (or so I think) that the plates on the necklace were not necessarily "gold" but may be hammered brass. Giving thought to what natural elements would they have at the ready. What raw materials would they use? Raw gems such as turquoise, bone, beads, clay, metals such as brass, silver, copper.

In the drawing below, I used my eraser end to put in place where I want the adornments to be. The shape of the headdress fitting the contour of the head, the nose ring, the earrings, the gemstones and placement of the necklace. This is my working copy of the portrait so I don't want to get hung up with the notion of possibly ruining it. Should I feel I've made a mistake, it's ok. I'll just fill it in again and do something over. For example contouring the shape of the headdress, you can see where I made an eraser line in the wrong direction, that's when I needed the help of the photograph on the left.

I'm not quite sure how I want to see the headdress. Maybe what's missing is a hair design. It's not quite working for me as of yet. I found some photos of hair weaving that might work to fit the headdress.

This is pretty cool.

Back to the drawing board.

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