Winnie in Moschino

This Instagram post was special. I'd been wanting to paint Winnie Harlow, both for her beauty and for her role as a spokesperson for people living with vitiligo, for a long time. When I came across coverage of the Fashion for Relief show last month and saw her in this fabulous Moschino jumpsuit, walking to raise money for the Times Up Legal Fund, I knew this was the image of her I wanted to capture.

Winnie's beautiful face is so sculpted and distinctive, it was easy for me to paint. The jumpsuit, however, took hours upon hours of drawing, redrawing, and painting in layers. In the end it took three times as long as I'd expected, but the results were worth it. Here's a timelapse of the process, condensing three days of work into two minutes!

The big surprise was that Moschino shared my painting on their Instagram account and it received over 23,000 likes in one day!

From that one share I picked up a ton of new Instagram followers, which put me over the 10,000 follower mark, a goal I'd been trying to achieve for a long time. The extra time and effort I'd put into this painting paid off in the end.