My first figure drawing

This is my first ever figure drawing. I copied her from a photograph in a magazine. I can list a whole lot of things that are wrong with it but I'm not going to because it's my first and I'm not unhappy with it. If I really was unhappy I wouldn't post it!

I need lots of practice before I'll have the guts to try a living, breathing person I think because the trouble with people is they move! I need them to be absolutely static for now to give me time for all that erasing and re-doing. I did it in pencil first until I thought it looked OK and then I drew it in ink and put in a little watercolour. For some reason the scan seems to have put some dirty marks on it - I think this may be a shadow of what's painted on the other side of the page. Note to self - don't paint on the back of other paintings or the scanner will pick it up.

I'm still working on the background applied with a roller - I did a page yesterday and was really pleased with it. It had lots of texture from the roller as well as colour. I just applied small blobs of Viridian and White to the page and rollered over it. I had to put a little more white on top of the darker green because it was too dark but the overall effect was just what I wanted. I should have posted a picture of it as the first stage of a journal page, but I drew some letters on top of the background and painted them in acrylic ink, the idea being to decorate them on top of the ink. But two things went wrong - I picked complementary colours for the letters and it didn't work, particularly because the background colours showed through and made the letters look really muddy. And acrylic ink has a sheen to it which didn't look very nice.

So I've treated it as a learning experience and will do another background and go from there. I'm wondering whether the acrylic has enough texture in it to mark some patterns into it before the paint dries. I'll experiment and see...