Taking Another Crack at Shuraka: A Loose Watercolor Figure Study
I'm Valerie Englehart, and today I'm sharing something a little different — not a tidy tutorial, but a real, slightly messy study session. I decided to take another crack at Shuraka, a character from Blossoms of the White Night by Brothers Without a Tomorrow. Last time I painted him, it was just his face in profile. This time, I gave myself a much bigger challenge: the full figure, lounging.
Starting With the Right Paper (and the Right Excuse to Procrastinate)
I was supposed to be finishing up other pieces and getting ready for travel. Instead, I thought, "What's something I've been meaning to paint and haven't?" So here we are.
I started on a piece of Arteza Expert cold press watercolor paper, 10 by 14 inches. I like to work bigger, and since this pose required room for an entire body instead of just a face, the extra size mattered. I painted with my favorite brush — a size 8 round in Silver Black Velvet, frayed and old and still going strong until I finally replace it.
Quinacridone Gold for the Exalted Sun
Since Shuraka is the Exalted Sun, I needed quinacridone gold somewhere in this piece. Last time, I used it for his skin tone. This time, I moved it into the background instead and let it stay sunny back there.
For the skin itself, I reached for M. Graham's quinacridone rust. All the quinacridones have this glow to them, and their transparency makes them perfect for skin tones — this time going with rust instead of gold was a noticeable improvement. For the red tones in the skin, I pulled out Winsor & Newton's brown madder, a color I don't use often but love for how transparent and lovely it is.
Admitting I Avoid Painting Figures
Here's an honest confession: I have a tendency to zoom way in when I paint people. Portraits, not figures. If you lay your own paintings side by side, you'll start noticing patterns like this too — things you gravitate toward without realizing it.
So I decided this piece would be about improving at figures specifically, not just portraits. That was made even harder by the fact that Shuraka is a manhwa character, drawn in a detailed comic style I had to translate into my own looser watercolor language — without pulling up a pile of extra reference images. I gave myself about an hour and just went for it.
I used permanent red pulled straight from my palette, along with a shimmery purple called lover's tears for the shadows — it's got a bit of glitter and bling to it that I love. I also dropped in some Winsor & Newton aqua green for the cooler shadow tones.
The Hands (You Knew This Was Coming)
Hands are usually the bane of an artist's existence, and while I'm generally fairly confident with them, this piece gave me trouble. Part of it was scale — even on a 10x14 sheet, I wasn't sketching first, and everything ended up small. Part of it was that I had to shift his hand position from the reference image entirely, since the mouthpiece was originally supposed to sit between his index and middle finger, and my foundation placement wouldn't allow it. So I changed it. That's allowed — you don't have to follow a reference image exactly, and unless someone knows the exact page and chapter this came from, they'd never know.
The bigger challenge was finding the balance between detail and looseness. I know how hands are built, and I wanted to add just enough detail to read clearly — but too much and I'd break the loose, dreamy quality of the rest of the piece. Too little and they'd just be blobs. That middle ground takes practice, and I'm still finding it.
Hinting at Abs Without Full Anatomy
Manhwa characters tend to have abs for days, and I wanted to hint at that without fully sculpting his body. A few lines, a few shadows, letting the shirt fall open at the midsection — and then leaving it alone.
Building the Face Without Overworking It
I didn't want heavy detail on the face, but I did want some dimension and warmth. I used the same brown madder from the shadows to add a little redness, then brought in aqua green around the eyes. The whites of the eyes are never fully white, so I'd already lifted color there earlier to keep the values soft. Warm colors push forward and cool colors recede, so a cool color like blue helps push the eye area gently back in space.
Since Shuraka has white hair, I softened the transition where the forehead meets the hairline so that when I added gouache later, there wouldn't be any hard, awkward lines.
At this point I was just dancing around the painting as it dried — does it need more red, more blue, a stronger value — while trying not to lose the light and life of the piece. I also noticed a bunch of little splatters of color landing on the upper right side of my paper from quickly rinsing my brush and flicking it off. Since this was just a study, I left them. Sometimes a happy accident earns its spot.
Bringing In Gouache for Hair and Gold Details
I squeezed out fresh gouache rather than reconstituting dried gouache, since it spreads better and stays more opaque straight from the tube. (I keep a little jam jar lid on my windowsill for exactly this.) Using a synthetic size 4 brush, I painted in a few wispy strands of hair, letting some of it drape in ways that weren't even in my reference photo — because I'm the artist, and I can. It's also a convenient way to cover up a few sins.
Gouache is opaque, but it still needs a colored surface underneath to really show up — the darker the value beneath it, the more the white pops. So before adding the gouache, I did some negative painting with quinacridone gold to separate the hair from the background.
I also brought that same light purple back in for shadows within the hair and on his white garment. A little goes a long way here — too much and it stops looking convincing and starts looking like a flat opaque shape. I do love how yellow and purple play off each other as complements.
For the eyes, I placed a small dot of aqua green for the irises and blended it out. I skipped the long eyelashes — this is meant to be a dreamy, half-remembered image, and you don't recall every eyelash when you're on the edge of a dream. I gave just a soft suggestion of them instead.
Finally, I shaped his brows with gouache. In the original scene, his expression reads more annoyed. I landed somewhere more thoughtful than annoyed — which just means there's room to try this pose again sometime.
Finishing With Liquid Gold Leaf
No painting of this character felt complete without some gold. I pulled out a liquid gold metal leaf I'd received as a gift and used it on his jewelry and the Eye of Natam on his forehead. The applicator is closer to a nail polish brush than a paintbrush, so fine detail wasn't really possible — I placed what I wanted and left it alone. Confidence in the stroke matters more than precision here.
A Few Final Thoughts
Struggling with a piece doesn't mean you're a bad artist — it means you need more practice at that specific thing, if it's something you want to keep doing.
The more you fiddle with an area that isn't working, the more you draw attention to it. A confident stroke left alone almost always reads better than an overworked one.
Painting things badly on purpose, as a study, is one of the fastest ways to actually improve.
You don't owe a reference image perfect accuracy. Change what you need to change.
I share pieces like this — the studies, the not-quite-there attempts — because I want you to see that I'm still learning too. Not everything I paint is a finished, polished piece, and honestly, it would be a little strange if it were. If everything I made was already perfect, what would I even be growing toward?