Forbidden Garden

A huge, huge thank you to the phenomenal photographer *alfred-georg for granting me permission to use his photo ludmilla1 [link] as reference for this drawing.
As soon as I saw her I fell in love and could picture her as a faery.

Originally I planned on having a landscape behind her depicting the garden of Eden (potentially with a half eaten apple somewhere in the composition) however I decided it didn't need to be that blatant so decided upon the subtlety and composition of leaf designs to symbolise the garden instead.

I enjoyed every moment of drawing this. It was challenging, attempting to get the snake skin texture and the hair (hair is always so challenging) but I'm really pleased with the outcome. I guess that's what happens when you have great photos to work from!

Oh yes, I have officially fallen in love with pencil again