Latest Digital Painting

This is an illustration for my digital painting class, for a story about a writer/journalist that becomes infatuated with a modest and lovely young woman, but the feelings are not mutual. "She was like one of the characters in his novels..." He asks her to marry him and she declines.

I wanted to use some of the physical elements associated with writing, and play on their romantic qualities, old-fashioned handwritten notes, pen and ink etc. The girl in the story is quite a few years younger, still a teenager actually, so there is an underlying tone in there, so the masculine symbol of the pen I thought was fitting. I scanned in some crumpled paper to add texture and sketched out different poses for the girl until I felt she looked demure enough. The most fun was painting the ink-in-water :)