Don’t let my face fool you, I’m nice as hell :)
Ghaimah is a portrait artist from Portland, Oregon who likes to keep things weird. Since childhood, she has been interested in exploring different mediums and has experimented with acrylic, watercolors, color pencils, and several others, but none of them brought her true satisfaction. Then she discovered Procreate and the Apple Pencil, which quickly became her favorite drawing tools.Ghaimah draws inspiration from music, television, Korean dramas, high fashion, and grunge or goth images she finds on Google and Pinterest. When she starts drawing, she easily escapes into her own world, and nothing else matters. Her goal is to create beauty in her portraits as a way to counteract the ugliness she sees in the real world. She purposefully adds glitches to her figures to remind viewers that nothing is perfect and that beauty and ugliness go hand in hand.Her portraits are bold, sassy, and brightly colored, with every stroke aiming to distract viewers from the troubles of the real world and bring them into the fun and chaos of her mind.
My character Lola Malla is a very vivacious person. She’s very charismatic, and bubbly. So I always tend to make her clothing and accessories match her personality. Bright, colorful, and girly.Since this illustration of her will be based on a poem I wrote called Innocence I decided to add balloons to the piece. The poem is about Lola growing up and losing the innocence she once had as a child. What do children love? Balloons. In the poem I wrote, there a line that goes “An open window, and a gust of wind. My innocence came to an end.”I reread this part and immediately had the idea to have an open window embedded in her chest, and have balloons flowing out of it. This was way better than the simple drawing of her holding balloons that I had it in my head.So first I gathered reference for the poses I might want her in. Then I searched for references for her shoes because she’s very fashion-forward and I imagine her having quite an extensive high-heel collection.I think pick the third pose and the high-heel design I liked.
I then found a reference for the style and color of the skirt I wanted her to wear, along with one with a better reference photo for the balloons.
I always start sketching in a color that isn't black. It's usually a light brown or blue. Then after I added most of the elements I wanted in the sketch, I changed the color of the sketch to black. I blacked out the background so I could focus more on the character and see the silhouette of the character better.
I then used a bubble brush I used in Procreate to create the balloons and add the first layer of colors.
I then start refining and shading everything. After, if I'm not satisfied with the colors, I go and mess with the hue, saturation, and brightness of the colors until I find something I like.
I wasn't happy with the skirt so I deleted a part of it and started to move it around with the liquify tool. Also mess around with the colors of her outfit, just to be sure that I'm truly happy with the punk I chose. When I’m done with that I change the hues in certain areas of her hair to give her streaks of pink and blue. Then I add a chromatic aberration effect to the whole piece.
I then just mess around with the finer details of the image. Like ruining her mascara, refining the shadows on the window, and adding a halo.
Hello! Thank you for visiting my website, if you have any questions, or if you're interested in hiring me for some work. Feel free to shoot me an email! Have a nice day/evening/night! 💙♥️
