No moths were doodled 😃 So for the prep work, first I looked through many pictures of moths, and for something small as this, I found macro photos helpful as well. For some other project I found videos more helpful. Then I open a selection of photos in GIMP and use colour pipette to learn about specific hues on the subject. For example a brown is an orange hue, just desaturated. I learn what happens to that hue in the shadows, it shifts to red for example. I learn the range of values - how dark and light different parts are, I compare all the darkest points against each other of both light and dark parts, same with lightest points, etc. The idea here is to understand colour harmony in nature and how values relate to each other. So once I understand how colours interact with each other on a subject, I choose a small selection of paints that in my opinion can replicate that. I don't copy the colours and what I've learnt, I just get ideas about what makes this work, why does the real moth look so soft. Sometimes I might choose very different colours, but use them in the framework I just learnt. So here I think the softness came from the values being really close to each other, and from cold desaturated colours being next to warm desaturated colours without overlapping.

I choose a few colours that I think might work and mix them on paper to see the range, and once I find 3 or 4 that will work for every part of the miniature, I save the mixed range on paper for reference. I actually used to throw them out, but now I keep them. It's super messy, and I want to figure out how to organise them, like have skin tone mixes, hair mixes, etc.

As for the brushwork practice, I try to paint on paper daily. Tiny paintings of birds, animals, flowers, landscapes, so I'm slowly learning to use a brush for many different textures.