When I started painting this, I really didn’t have a plan—like a lot of my paintings, it’s a portrait of a woman’s face, and honestly, that’s about as far as I’d thought about it initially.

But I’d been binge-watching painting process videos from one of my absolute favorite artists, Peter Polach (known online as Apterus), and I was absolutely mesmerized by his process. He starts a lot of his paintings by laying down basic shapes in an array of odd colors, often using a brush set to randomly vary hue/color, and these random colors really make the shapes come alive as he finds the volume, shading, and composition along the way.

Something I’ve always struggled with in my own art is breaking out of certain “boxes” in my mind about how to use color, and the way Apterus not only uses color, but essentially completely disregards it and lets it kind of develop organically on its own absolutely fascinated me. So while I was working on this painting, I was basically experimenting with some of his techniques, letting my brush just randomly vary the hue as I laid down the initial shapes and focused more on using light and dark to create the volume and definition instead of leaning so heavily on “this part should be this color, and this part should be this color…” etc.

Since the portrait that starting coming together was so shimmery and iridescent, I leaned into that. I’ve always loved the beautiful, shimmering rainbow halo around the full moon on cold, frosty nights, and I essentially see this character as kind of a physical embodiment of that cold, iridescent moonlight. (There’s also probably at least a little influence from Apterus’s recurring character Irene, too.)