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.
One of the first ideas I wanted to implement in painting was to paint Doroteja with fish in the sky. As in the drawing by Doroteja, the fish’s fast whirlwinds resembled gusts of wind. And a fish flying among the clouds can only be in fairy tales, so I really liked this idea.
I decided to use watercolour technique for this idea and work with highly diluted acrylic paint. Watercolour works are very bright. In these type pf works, white coloured paint is almost never used, as there is a whiteness of the paper for this. The textures created by watercolours often look very light and floating. As a result, it seemed to me that this technique would convey bright and light clouds well.
How to paint clouds with watercolours? If I wanted to convey a realistic picture, I would need to study the shapes and colours of the clouds from the photographs, which I have tried. However, I realized that it would take a lot of time, and I can’t even predict if parents would like it. In addition, I do not need to paint realistic paintings to give the impression of the sky. Even with very abstract strokes, the viewer will usually have associations of the real world.
This way, I decided to give the impression of a sky simply by playing with dark and light, allowing the paint to choose for itself where to spread on moistened paper.
The next step was to implement this idea on a larger format (A2) to paint a fish and a girl into the composition.
This detail of the painting shows how I added a few contrasting colours to playfully enliven the painting. I thought it could be yellowish and orange rays of the sun on the clouds – a feature of the romantizme style (or perhaps it’s just my sentimentality). To add a modern “spice”, I had the idea to incorporate these colours using geometric strokes that would contrast with organically washed cloud colours.
In addition, geometric strokes resemble architecture, so they could convey some outlines of a castle. A castle in the clouds sounds like a fairy tale (and maybe a cliché, but I like to turn a cliché idea into original paintings). I decided that I could play with how to convey the contours of a castle with the condition if the family chose this painting version as their favourite. For this time, I thought, I would save some time and paint just simple geometric forms.
I tried to convey the girl, similarly to the sky, with light watercolour shades. I left the light parts unpainted using the whiteness of the paper. I tried to shape the body and face by layering shadows – starting with the brightest patches (legs, hands, etc.) and finishing with dark details (face features).
I remember very well how my mother worried a lot for me because she didn’t like that the girl’s face looked like with a moustache. It makes me laugh because I still don’t see those moustaches. Even if my mother was right about my bad face shadowing, I wasn’t worried, because this painting is just a draft sketch that aims to preliminary convey the painting idea of the painting. If parents liked this idea but didn’t like the face shading, it’s easy for me to improve it in the next version. It would simply take more time.
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