My response to this week’s Life Book lesson is an example of my commitment to share my art work from that course whether I like the outcome or not. The lesson was taken by Susana Tavares and was about illustrating with watercolour and adding finishing details with pen. It was a lesson that should have been comfortably within my wheelhouse but somehow I still went wrong. I started with the face and struggled to render decent flesh tones. I think I went too heavy with the ochre for the shadows, I didn’t maintain enough white paper for highlights, and I didn’t get the pinks looking rosy enough. The hair was completed using a wet in wet technique and I definitely overdid it as it all feathered and bloomed more than I intended. Straying from the exemplar in the tutorial, I decided the hair could be like the night sky, and I decided to string the planets from our solar system around her neck like a beaded necklace. It was not a well thought through execution of the concept. I don’t think it was a coincidence that I was completely over-scheduled and exhausted this week. For me, art is a useful counterpoint to a stressful week but that does not mean the product is always as worthwhile as the act of creation itself.
A Pict in PA 