Spring 04: 29/04/2023

This week I completed the first piece in Sellisternian's spring themed trio. You can catch up on last week's work here, the overall idea for Sellisternian here and my practice for this process here.

Here we are, almost four months later, at the third Spring piece and final painting in Sellisternian overall. We'll hopefully end on a high with this self portrait in the guise of the ancient symbol of the Green Man.

One last time! An Imperial sheet of Fabriano Artistico 300gsm, hot pressed watercolour paper, taped to an A1 canvas board. A graphite transfer of my digital sketch and details added in black Polychromos, blue Polychromos for the water drops. As it's the third of the season we'll also have an acrylic landscape element that will get a layer of gesso to start. For Spring this part will be in the large hands masking the face.

Before cracking on with the fineliners I put a layer of acrylic paint across those landscape hands. I applied it with a small toothed spatula for texture, gradating from a bright sky to a green and yellow lawn. I then used a watercolour marker to add the stylised hands over this background, taking advantage of it's slight transparency to get a bit of the underlying colour shining through.

The eyes on the face and on the lower hand were detailed in blue liner, as was the pattern on the hand and the water drops. I put in the background pattern with yellow liner, making sure it peeked through the floral centres and matched with the blue pattern on the lower hand. I started on the jewellery elements with red liner and veined the leaves in green.

Lots of work to be done with acrylic ink here, starting with lemon yellow in the background pattern and some of the florals. Washed out yellow also went in the snow drop stems. Bold red went in the vein-like stems and the ribbons outlining the figure's 'robe'. I heavily diluted the same red to shade the portrait elements, florals and jewellery. Yellow ochre went in the sunny orb over the figure's heart area and the jewellery elements. Phthalo blue went in the patterned lower hand and the face, then wet-in-wet in the flowers and water drops. I also used it to add a little more texture and shading on the landscape hands. Once that was all thoroughly dry it was watercolour time!

I started with a light wash of PG50 and PV19 all over the patterned background and petals, leaving the snowdrops as paper-white. Quinacridone gold went in the sunny orb and the jewellery, then mixed with magenta for a light skin tone for the face and lower hand. Washed out teal went on the snowdrop stems and water drops before mixing with the quinacridone gold for the various eyes across the piece. The leaves are alternating Green Apatite Genuine and a mix of phthalo green and manganese violet with a bit of quinacridone gold and teal dropped in for texture. Finally I reinforced the red areas with pyrrole scarlet before adding loose red strokes growing from the florals and across the composition.

I started detailing with yellow pencil, bumping up the rain drops, snowdrops and eyes. Red pencil and wax pastel emphasized and extended all of the red strokes, ribbons and details. Deep blue pencil enhanced some of the little shadow details and white gouache went in various highlights. A final splash of gold gouache and Sellisternian is done!

I am so pleased with this last little slice of Sellisternian and, most exciting, I'm sure that I couldn't have painted it this time last year. It's colourful, busy and a bit strange in all the ways that I want to push in my future work.

It's been great to explore landscape alongside Sellisternian, the portraits and this sketchbook have definitely fed in to and supported each other. I don't doubt that all these different paints and techniques and themes and portrait and illustration and landscape will continue to cross pollinate in my work going forward.

(This sketchbook is now complete, check it out here in the gallery)

Doodlebook is about two thirds full by now, it's been a really useful accompaniment while working on Sellisternian. For me it's important to always have somewhere low pressure to draw as a break from final pieces, or to record ideas that I don't have time to develop yet. It's also encouraged me to go and draw out and about which is again a valuable change from sitting at my desk working on finals. Cheers Doodlebook, definitely a habit that I'll keep up!

I'm still working my way through this amazing Christmas present, an absolute beast of a book about William Morris and his many avenues of work. His curious and generous approach to both his work and the wider world is really inspirational and I'd like to close with this passage from the book:

'His idea of democratizing art was to work towards where everyone would have the opportunity to pursue creative work, exercising their brains and their hands and with time and space to enjoy the fruits of their labour...All work done with pleasure, he argued, is art.'

Well thank you for reading to the end! There's no 'next week' to link you to this time, I'll now switch to monthly art updates on the last day of the month so I'll link to that when it's up. Along with the completed Sellisternian Gallery and final thoughts.

Cheers,

Ailsa