Purple Week: Beth and Brook, How To Live With Grace

This picture took a bit of time, but Karilan, the creator of the two sims, did say she had given me a challenge. These two sims enjoying some karaoke are the sisters, Beth and Brooke from Karilan’s How To Live With Grace. The chapter where this scene is from is actually a wordless chapter, which I think is done really articulately, and, as CathyTea writes in the comments, is very ‘heartwarming’ and ‘tender.’

I wanted to capture the fun these two sisters are having, so I decided to have fun as well and sort of splashed paint here and there, not really caring too much about accuracy of body proportions – Beth’s arm is quite extended, although it’s difficult to see because the paper was too big for my scanner. What you may have noticed with my painting, however, is that neither of the character’s skin-tones matched the ones in real life. Why I did this is because I wasn’t going for representation, but more interpretation of emotion, so warmer colours – as you can see I use a lot of reds on the skin – would best capture the’heartwarming’ theme of the chapter.

Another thing I did was leave in my mistakes, such as plaint blotches and pencil lines – although I do this in most of my artwork. Here, it has a different meaning. It’s about the history of the two, taking the rough with the smooth. They’ve had their hard times, but today they are having a really good time. It’s not called How To Live With Grace for nothing. XD

These two sisters were, overall, so much fun to draw. Seriously, I am rather sad it’s over. How To Live With Grace is definitely worth a read, if you want to know how to make an effective wordless chapter.