Today in my city we celebrate the pilgrimage of the Divina Pastora, one of the largest religious events in Venezuela and the world, where the image of the Virgin Mary travels through the streets from Santa Rosa to the Cathedral in a massive procession. It is a beautiful and meaningful event for all of us who live here. For this reason, I have honored her with illustrations on three occasions, not consecutively, but I have done so, so this time would be no exception. I even thought I wouldn't be able to do it, but I broke the record! I hope you like the result as much as I do.

Here I had already planned to do the image of her hugging her son, taking a reference from Pinterest for the positions and such. After that, I made the sketch. I should mention that, at first, I thought of putting the Venezuelan flag in the foreground, but then I changed my mind and painted it behind the figure.

After completing the clean lines and changing the background, since this allows me to better visualize the color tones, I proceeded to add the base colors to the shapes.

After that, I added the respective shadows and details to the skin, hair, and hat. I really liked the effect of a brush in Krita for the hair; it's like a hair brush, something like that. I know it's called the hair brush. Of course, I also achieved the same effect with a blur brush, and I played with the tones of white, black, and shades of gray. I added a detail to the hat as if it had a shiny ribbon.

Before moving on to the Virgin's clothing, I proceeded to add shadows to the baby's outfit. Then, looking more closely at the image of the clothing she will wear this year, I realized it is pink with rose prints and white lace, so I painted everything pink and added the respective print using a Krita brush I downloaded separately, and finally, the shadows.

I removed the white areas and, using another shape brush, tried to simulate the lace patterns, which was very difficult and didn't turn out as I wanted, but it's okay.

In the background, I added the Venezuelan flag, without much detail, just some brushstrokes and stars that a brush already has in its shape. To reduce the intensity of the background a bit, I added a layer of pinkish color and lowered the opacity, just so the background wouldn't overwhelm the figure.

As ​​I was finishing up, I felt something was missing, so I added leaf shapes in various shades of pink and white around the edges, blurring this layer so it wouldn't steal the show. I also added some sparkles for decoration.

As ​​I almost always do in my illustrations, I added a texture layer, with the blending mode set to overlay and the opacity lowered to 82%, to give that grainy paper effect.

This is the result, which is in its original format and another, inside an oval shape. Which one do you like more? (I've included images of the three previous versions)