Lotus...in progress

The Lotus of Creation is giving me joy and grief...part of it are coming our just as I wanted, part are driving me insane. Here is a mini swatch with tentative color schemes. I chose the fist, which was also the one I elaborated on more. You can see which Copic markers I chose for the composition.

All appeared perfectly simple when working on an 1x1" surface. The trouble came when I started working on the real drawing. I want to give the goddess figure in the middle a rich chocolate skin...after all the Indian myths and legends surrounding creation are the inspiration for this piece. However, my experience with deeply dark skin tones is practically non existent...bottom line, after putting down the greys (W3 and W5), when I began layering E39, I realized I was flattening all the face features and the 3-dimensionality of the body. So I frantically tried to repair the mistake using light tones (E02 and ultimately R000) to take away the excessive color. Then I grew discouraged and started to work on the flower, which I loved. Later, I went back and retouched some more the skin. This is what the drawing looks like at the moment

...well, I'll have to work more on this, I am afraid, probably with pencils, given that the paper has about taken as much ink as it possibly could. Things look much better now, though (believe me!...it's probably difficult to make out details, since I took the picture at dusk...).

There is still the upside down goddess, to deal with though...and I am not sure what to do, because ideally she is identical to the first one, but I am trying to avoid the mistakes I made there so....we'll see. :)