Illustration: A Sleepy Lagoon

I had such fun with last week's Colour Collective that I decided to continue the Coles Phillips Fadeaway Girl theme with this week's colour, which was Magenta Haze. I'd titled last week's illustration with an old song featuring a moon (Moonlight Serenade) and this week I decided to go with another song, A Sleepy Lagoon, which has always struck me as a purple-sounding piece of music. I play it on the piano and it was written by Jack Lawrence and Eric Coates. 

A sleepy lagoon

A tropical moon

And two on an island

A sleepy lagoon

And two hearts in tune

In some lullaby land

The fireflies gleam

Reflects in the stream

They sparkle and shimmer

A star from on high

Falls out of the sky

And slowly grows dimmer

The leaves from the trees

All dance in the breeze

And float on the ripples

I'm lost in a spell

That nightingales tell

Of Roses and dew

The memory of

This moment of love

Will haunt me forever

A tropical moon

A sleepy lagoon

And you.

Want to hear it? Here's Dinah Shore singing it. 

I kept to the same basic composition as last week, with the moon behind, but I started much earlier in the week and was able to add more detail. I enjoyed creating all the palm fronds, but the reflection of the moon was a bit tricker. For a while I toyed with giving her a white hibiscus instead of a red one, but in the end I went with red, as the addition of the warm red colour made everything feel a bit more tropical by heating up the whole colour scheme. I enjoy keeping to a limited pallette, however, so nearly every colour here owes something to magenta, apart from the white of the moon and the red accents.

Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2