"Who on earth could blame them? Ah, no wonderthe men of Troy and Argives under arms have sufferedyears of agony all for her, for such a woman.Beauty, terrible beauty!deathless goddess – so she strikes our eyes!"

Black and white sketch as the main conception of Helen.

Some closeups of the final piece

What we actually know of Helen's appearence according classic works is pretty vague. Homer describes her as white-armed (so obviouly a fair sking is correct), lovely-haired and long-dressed.

But on a surviving fragment of a poem written by Sappho, Helen's hair is described as Xanthe (a tone anywhere between blonde, light brown or reddish). And in other lyric poems stays she has gleaming blue eyes.

References

I know the dressing with this kind of makeup and hairstyle are't pretty accurate and some reinterpretations of Helen are portraying her with the minoan but I really wanted to incorporate somewhere the swan brooch (in reference of her birth from an egg as daughter of swan-transformed Zeus and Leda).

Helen's expression, incredibly expressive and vulnerable, was done as if she were looking at something that moved or pained her. She doesn't fall into the typical "femme fatale" frame, but rather humanizes her. The ritual red marks already feel like part of her iconography to evoke the sacred or even sacrificial aspect that mythology attributes to her (the woman for whom a war was fought).