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 mentioned in the post “Preparation and Idea Generation”, I came up with the initial ideas while working on small-format sketches with watercolour paint.
One of the ideas was to paint a background to appear like a vortex. I tired to convey the impression that Doroteja with the fish is in a world where the sky is mixing with water. A blue shade watercolour can look both like clouds and water, so I can play infinitely with composition and textures.
Since I have already decided that the painting will be oval, the idea of a vortex came about naturally.
Unfortunately, when I increased the scale of this composition from A5 to A2 format and added the girl with fish, I lost some of the background features that I liked in the initial sketch.
First of all, in the initial sketch I highlighted watercolour textures with pink and green colours. Working with a larger format, I tried to add these colourful details as well, but I tried to be careful not to exaggerate. I was so cautious that I used too little pink and green paint. The colour highlights almost completely disappeared in the scaled up composition.
Secondly, I did not predict that the central vortex will become covered by the girl with the fish. Although the final composition retained the impression that the sky is mixed up with water, the “snail” in the middle disappeared, thereby losing the rotational acceleration of the composition.
Changes and mistakes usually occur when you increase the scale of a work of art. At that time, all I could do was notice my mistakes and remember them for the future. If Doroteja’s parents liked this idea the most, I could experiment more with composition and coloured textures.
When conveying the whirlwinds of fish, I worked with a brush of long bristles and ink liquid paint so that I could draw the swirls without running out of paint too soon. In some places, I thickened the lines and added highlights to create a 3D illusion and to make it appear as if the fish was made up of floundering and intertwined bands.
The portrait of a girl in this composition is very bright and faint. This is because the girl is actually a printed version of the first painting. Since this composition is as light and made with watercolours just like in the previous painting version of this idea (Doroteja and Angry Fish in the Sky), in the final work of art the portrait of a girl would look almost the same as in the previous one. I didn’t see the point in painting the same portrait again, especially when it took me an hour and a half. Therefore, I decided to use the printer – to copy and print a portrait of the girl from the first painting. Well, I noticed that my printer is not particularly of high quality, but if someone needed a better example, parents could look at the first painting version.
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