São Tomé watercolor

Good morning!

I'm working on a new piece for the final watercolor as we speak.
I completed a fashion illustration while I stayed in São Tomé,
but being inspired so much by my fine artist friends there, my work became more realistic.
That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing, but I am now going to only exhibit that piece for the Summer Study Abroad show,
re-do another painting and show the new one for my Summer Thesis show.

Here's what I did in São Tomé:

Marlin, or the swordfish, will come up often during this travel. In Portuguese they're called "peixe andala" (fish marlin) and they're SUPER delicious!

I wanted to redraw this same image and just stylize it a bit more for the fashion illustration, but I ended being inspired by the pose, but changing the girl entirely. Check out what I have so far:

Excuse the documentation quality: scanning for me is such a hassle because it's smaller than my works and it tends to saturate my pieces more. At some point I'm going on campus to re-scan all my final work for my website.
Anyhow, in the re-do I made the her hold a bucket of fabrics. The background will be the river scene with other women washing their clothes. I'm not sure how well you can see in this image, but there's a little boy holding her hand and also a toy car made of plastic bottle in his other hand.

Critiques are always welcome. :)

Next blogpost I'll show you my travel book. At some point I have to show you the box I carved too! About 2 and a half weeks stay in São Tomé, some of us worked with the professional word-carvers and either commissioned them, or learned to hand carve wood with them. I'm very proud of the box. The top is a mancala board (or "jogo de arrur" in Portuguese. I'm probably butchering the spelling. If anyone knows it, please correct me) and the bottom has a little drawer to put the playing pieces in, in my case, sea-shells I collected on the island.