[Anne Grundy]

When starting with a dark base coat for the hair you will need to lighten some areas for the highlights. For this you will need to apply opaque colours to make the highlights - which can be difficult, especially if you have difficulty getting opaque white to spray evenly. As you are using bristol board, another altenative for highlights is to use the scratch method by scraping off the paint with a sharp object such as an xacto knife. The area can be sprayed with lighter colours and then at the end you can scratch out more white highlights. For myself, I prefer to work from light to dark - ie leaving highlight areas white so that I can use lighter transparent colours. The last colours used would be the very dark colours.

Start the way you suggested by using light transparent brown and build up your shading. For now leave the really light areas of skin as white paper - overspray will soften the edges of these areas.

For the lips - try and colour match the lightest area of the lips (pink) and use this over the whole area of the lips with the exception of white highlighted areas. This will give you a guide to separating the lips from the surrounding skin on her face. Then build up to the darkest areas of her lips.

The eyes... Well unfortunately your reference photo does show a difficult angle of the eye and it is a bit fuzzy - on the bright side, you only have to paint one! Paint what you see in your reference photo - don't be tempted to paint what you know an eye looks like.

Post another progress picture and let us see how you are going.

Happy Airbrushing!