During our creative session, I gave pipettes to sisters Evija (8) and Adele (6) and showed them how to fill them with paint and make colourful drawings/paintings on paper. Both sisters played with pipettes for a while and their works were transforming substantially. At some point, Evija folded her paper in half (likely inspired by our previous game) and her work turned into symmetrical blue abstraction.
When I asked Evija – what it could be if it was a fairy tale? – she said it‘s a bird and that she would be that bird in a fairy tale. Later, Evija changed her mind and said that she would be a dragon. Thus, my intention was to use her original drawing as inspiration to paint her as a dragon.
There are countless artworks of dragons online, and I didn‘t want my works to appear similar to the many. Works by Kandinsky (to see which works, read this blog post) inspired me to playfully simplify and delineate the body.
I was wondering how I could convey the wings. It seemed that a dragon is often portrayed as a giant lizard with the wings of a bat. Thus, I surfed the Internet for examples of how to draw bat wings. The search term ‘bat wings drawing’ brings up a lot of good examples. The best ones I found were from istockphoto.com and canstockphoto.com.
I didn’t want to depict dragon’s wings just like that of a bat just using the blue colours from Evija’s original drawing because in my eyes it would appear too cliché. I took inspiration from Evija’s drawing and decided that I could make the bat wings appear as if they are melting and splashing around.
Melting wings brought to mind the myth of Icarus. Although Icarus was warned by his father not to fly too high, Icarus became overexcited and flew too close to the sun, causing his wings to melt and leading to his untimely death. (source: greekmythology.com ) In a way this story can refer to Evija’s desire to be such a powerful creature like a dragon and that there is danger in that ambition.
Since in my illustration of the fairy tale one of the Evija’s wings is folded, I looked up bat photographs with wings folded in. A folded wing might seem a very simple task to draw but it’s always good to refer to real world examples so that it wouldn’t appear too off point.
Once most of the research was done, firstly I wanted to draw out the whole composition of the painting on paper. If I worked straight away on canvas, it would have been difficult and time-consuming to make changes or correct mistakes. I used a projector to enlarge the original illustration from A4 into A2 format. Then I worked with a pencil to draw out all the details.
When I was satisfied with the drawing, I used tracing paper to transfer it onto canvas (I already painted the background of the painting before doing that). I found a video on youtube as a good tutorial for using tracing paper on canvas. Because my canvas was much larger than that in the tutorial, I slid in hard-pressed cardboard behind the canvas to make the surface hard. It’s good to use a very soft pencil (3B and above).
Looking at the painting by Evija, I could see that she used three colours – light blue, purple and black. During the process, the light blue and black mixed up creating the fourth colour – dark blue. Thus, I mixed up these four colours and used them to shape the melting bat wings.
For the artists out there, you might be facing troubles trying to mix up a vivid purple colour by using primary blue and red. For me, the purple would turn out to be somewhat muddy, and back then I did not know what the problem was. I ended up using pre-mixed purple from a tube. Only later I learned that true primary colours are yellow, cyan and magenta. Mixing cyan and magenta makes vivid purple.
These are the pipettes I used to paint the wings as well as to create the drops and splashes. One bottle is a finished glitter glue, the other I bought on ebay.
When I was applying the final splashed around the wings, I made a mistake of diluting the paint with too much linseed oil. I needed to dilute the paint to create a single-cream consistency so that it would run smoothly from pipettes and that it would form nice round drops. I thought that mixing the paint with spirit/turpentine would make the drops ‘disolve’ out of shape. (If you want to know what I mean, try painting in watercolour effect on canvas by using oil paint diluted with spirit). The linseed drops were nice, round and shiny but they were not drying out for several weeks. When I lost patience, I ignited fireplace in my flat and placed the painting next to it. It finally worked but I promised myself never to dilute the paint with so much linseed.
