Mira as Promised

I know I failed to live up to my promise again. Nevertheless, due to lethargy and my mom's headache, our scheduled trip to my aunt's place where we would be staying for a week is postponed for tomorrow. Since I've decided to leave my laptop and just rent nearby PCstations, I wouldn't be able to upload new pics of my creations for Lunatica for the rest of the upcoming week. So here I am, blogging and posting the pics I have promised albeit several days later than intended. As they say, better late than never lol. 
Let's get started with these photographs of Mira, the reincarnated form of Ylen. As is my typical style, I used a variety of pens and inks with strategically placed streaks of liquid eraser. Working on a pure white paper with colored inks is something I haven't done before. Ylen was my first creation, and as expected, the colors came out more vibrant. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but the newness of using white paper  made me quite apprehensive at first.  
Logically, since using white papers and canvases is the usual norm for artists, I shouldn't be troubled. Wrong. Actually, even if it is more challenging to use colored papers, for there is no telling how their color would react with the ink pigments, working on white paper bothered me. Colored papers, though tricky to use, are more exciting to manipulate. I can't elucidate how I figure out that the specific colors I choose would be the right one to bring out the desired effect I have in mind. I just know that it would work out. Fortunately for me, my artistic sixth sense has never failed me so far. 
Halfway through working on Ylen, I finally found peace with working on white paper. Until I finished her and made the improvements later on(which is featured below with the progress and finished study of Mira) after I have posted the first set of photographs of her initial appearance, I was already at ease with working on white paper. But when I started doing Mira, rendering her in an effort to achieve a human coloring unlike the mystical Ylen, the apprehension and doubt returned. 
The final outcome of Mira was not half bad. But pressed by the ever-insistent voice that has always prompted me to make her come out no less than perfect, I worked on her too much for too long. The result: she is too mysterious, freaky even, and the quality of her appearance does not exactly fit the bill. I am currently working on Zulayka, her beautiful sister with a serpentine-like lower torso, and like what I did with Mira, I took pictures of my progress. I am thinking of using a real sketch pad or textured paper next time.
These are just studies after all despite their very finished appearances. By next month, I would start making the larger final illustrations on bigger-sized white and colored papers. This means I starting from square one, the first character which is Ylen, again. I would work on these illustrations side by side with the Lunatica synopsis and its plot outline. working on these studies in my journal is just an exercise to fire me up and get my creative juices working for me full force. Even if I had spent more than four hours doing each of these studies--following your artistic intuition alone as you work really means plodding as the whole image comes together bit by bit, I don't find it a waste of my time and effort. I'm going to keep these illustrations as part of my art portfolio. 

Here are the photographs of the improved Ylen. I made her eyes more luminous.