zebra profile portrait

Day four challenge - paint a face with zebra accents.  For Milliande and many others, this means putting stripes on the face.  I saw it a little differently.  I pictured a woman, not unlike myself, trying to channel her inner zebra, and putting her hair in a fauxhawk, to look like a zebra's mane.

Needless to say, this type of painting with acrylics is very new to me.  Anyway, about the earring - when I painted this, and it was nearly dry, I was looking at it and it occurred to me that a woman like this, even with no makeup and no hair coloring, if she took the time to push her hair into a fauxhawk, she would also be wearing earrings, probably big gold ones.  I didn't want to paint any more, and I sincerely doubted my ability to render decent gold earrings, so I started rummaging through my stash to see if I had an actual gold earring I could glue in place.  Then I remembered - back in the seventies, I had these big button earrings that were zebra patterned, and I decided that if this woman was channeling her inner zebra, she would have earrings exactly like those.  I punched the circles from yesterday's stamped black paper, and deepened the white strips with gel pen.   They look incongruous with the rest of the painting, but I am not Vermeer; this is not a canvas, this is an art journal.