In the first post, I briefly described my creative session with children Doroteja (8) and Domas (5). Later, I used the drawings by children, their stories and photographs to create 10 different ideas for a Neverland Portrait. Out of these ideas, the family chose their favourite – Doroteja and Angry Fish. The video below briefly shows the whole story of how this idea came about.
In this and future posts, I will talk about the further development of this idea and its various painterly versions.
As I said in the post Preparation and Idea Generation for a Painting ‘Doroteja and Angry Fish, I painted the initial ideas on small format (A5) sheets of paper with watercolours. The first ideas were Doroteja and Angry Fish in the Sky, Doroteja and Angry Fish in a Vortex, Doroteja and Angry Fish Underwater and Doroteja and Angry Fish in Crystal Oval.
The next idea that came to my mind was to paint Doroteja with the fish over water – either surfing on waves or flying over them. That’s what my A5-sized sketch looked like.
The composition of the waves was not yet resolved and the idea itself was not very clearly depicted, but back then I already had decided I would use the “marbling” painting technique (which I discovered a few years ago when I was experimenting with acrylic paint of cream liquidity (you can learn more about this technique in the next post)) to convey the ripples of the water surface, and to use impasto technique with acrylic paints of whipped cream consistency to convey the clouds. (The latter idea was abandoned eventually)
The Fish
Since this composition had a horizon (unlike in the previous versions on this Neverland Portrait), I needed to rethink how I could convey the body of the fish because in the past compositions I was able to convey the fish in semi-translucent way with simple spiralling lines. In this composition, it would also be possible to convey the body of the fish as semi-translucent, but it was more useful for me to vary the appearance of the fish in each version of the painting.
So how can I paint a fish within this background? I decided to practice on a small format with multiple variations.
I wasn’t very happy with the first sketches, which I created simply out of experimenting with paint and my own invented ideas. As a result, I decided to look for colour inspiration on the Internet.
This led me to the idea that the fish could be grey, because I wanted to convey Doroteja with the fish on a colossal wave like in a storm, so the greyish shades would reflect the wild nature even more.
From these experiments, I came to the conclusion that a light fish with “dirty-coloured” brushstrokes will look the best.
Girl's posture
I received a comment from my dad that in previous version of this painting the girl’s posture did not reflect the fact that she is trying to harness the dangerous fish. He showed me that she should keep her legs wide because of the hard-to-maintain balance and be leaning back while holding on to the leash. Well yes, I agree. However, I can’t change a child’s posture so easily and make sure it looks like Doroteja.
Nevertheless, I decided to try to slightly change the position of her legs. It seemed like a rather simple thing to do, but I struggled a lot. It turned out that I still don’t know how to draw a child’s body in correct proportions, and back then I felt it wasn’t the right time to start studying the anatomy of children’s bodies. I just wanted to complete this creative phase of the project as soon as possible because of other upcoming plans.
I got an idea to pose in front of the camera myself and adapt my anatomy in accordance to proportions of children. In the end, I somehow managed to do it.
The Wave
The next step was the arrangement of the entire composition. The composition of my original sketch was not fully resolved, so I wanted to change the position of the wave. There’s always an option to copy a realistic world, but since it’s a fairy tale, I didn’t want to do that at all. I chose the opposite – to convey the wave naively, denying a number of laws of the real world.
The naïve style of painting is very popular these days, so my choice is not that extraordinary. Nevertheless, naivety closely relates to childishness, so I appreciate this style a lot.
As I said at the beginning of this post, I wanted to paint the surface of the wave using the “marbling” technique (you will learn more about this technique in the next post). For this painting, I had to study how the waves and ripples of a sea look like. The best tutorial I found in this video:
I must say that it was very interesting to fully understand and see what constitutes that charming surface of a stormy ocean. From my accumulated knowledge in art making, I decided to use four colours for the marbling technique: dark blue (ocean depth), white (wave foams), greenish (when the light shines through the peaks of the waves) and blue (that is a reflection of the sky on the water). With these colours, I filled my pipettes and this way painted the entire texture of the wave.
The Sky
When I painted the water with the marbling technique, I no longer wanted to paint clouds with creamy impasto. It seemed to me that there was already a lot of texture going on and it would be better to convey the sky with more subtle colour transitions. The fact that Doroteja and the fish were in a storm reminded me of the romantism painting ”The wanderer above the sea of fog” by Caspar David Friedrich.
Inspired by this painting, I decided to convey the sky of my painting in a similar manner. Well, only I wasn’t able to portray it so well because of fast-drying acrylic paint. Since I still considered it as a draft version, I didn’t spend too much time on it and I didn’t fixing it.
Behind the scenes
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