Resource and Humility - Batgirl and Supergirl

Nothing against Marvel comics, but I definitely prefer the DC comics characters. You may know my favourite is Batman and the Teen Titans (pre-Go!). So I am a happy chapped for there to be a heroine that somewhat merges these ideas, Batgirl! Though actually a young adult, Batgirl has been depicted as a teenager or child in multiple depictions of the superheroes. I have read a Batgirl comic, Batgirl is awesome.

There is also another hero like this, the female counterpart to the famous Superman, it's Supergirl, popular enough to be leading her own show currently! Since the Batman v Superman film, there has been the release of a series of fan comics between Batgirl and Supergirl, these are the absolute best and got me to like Supergirl as well. So here I decided to draw these two heroes together at long last.

I wanted to draw these two back to back and I think it has been one of the best ideas I've had. Their designs were able to blend their shapes nicely like an illustration on a playing card. It took me a couple of days to work on the line art and it's one of the most beautiful line arts I have ever made. I even decided during the line art to add Batman and Superman into the background as silhouettes, just to fill in the blank spaces created by the Superman shape acting as a background.

And then we come to colouring, which is a combination of markers and watercolour pencil. My colour choices felt perfect and looked so beautiful as a whole, I even swatches the colours prior to make sure nothing would go wrong. But oh was I wrong! I only had the black and the sky left to apply water to and then the horrific happened; the sky blended into Batgirl's skin! I tried my best to remove the sky from her face before the water could dry away, but even worse happened. The ink was picked up and the entire upper lip was smeared! My hard work up until now was a pride of my sketchbook and now that was all lost to a bleed. However was I to make this presentable?

Here is a view of the situation I was faced with.

Now I remember seeing in numerous sketchbook tours that some artists would censor their mistakes or blips by recreating their former glory on a separate layer of paper or a post-it note. I happened to have a scrap piece of paper that was roughly the same tone as the paper in my sketchbook. This gave me the idea to recreate Batgirl's face (below the mask only) and so I dredges the outline of her nose, lips and chin. Granted the shape of her face was slightly different now but it was as close as I was going to get without losing my patience. I then inked and coloured the sample, but I took an extra precaution to reassure myself the same mistake couldn't happen again. The sky was recreated separately and the face became a cutout. I would stick the face over my finished sky and there would be no bleeding. After that, the amended sample was stuck over my mistake and now even though there is a slightly noticeable bevel in the illustration, Batgirl finally looks equal to Supergirl in quality!

I may be a perfectionist but I am still prone to mistakes, but this artwork is a show of resource and that if you make a mistake, it's not impossible to fix. Granted this is a simple method that could be self taught to anyone but it's about having the calm to do so and not giving up on your art. I almost did that with this and I am very glad not to have done so. Given that this piece is about superheroes, I think it's fair to say that I was able to serve justice to this masterpiece!