I’ve just added my newest work, “Gone But Not Forgotten”, to my portfolio, and I thought it would be fun to make a blog post documenting the process from start to finish. Everyone’s creative process is a little different, and personally I love seeing work in progress pics.
Step 1: Thumbnailing
Thumbnails refer to the small, short-hand drawings created by artists to get the general idea and composition of their piece down on paper. Often these don’t make sense to anyone but the artist themselves, but it is an important part of the process. In this case I knew I wanted 2 important things in the image: A woman in full late-Victorian mourning dress holding a necklace, and a skull in the background made of flowers. I love the aesthetic of this period in history, and their obsession with death combined with their love of detail inspired me to create a death-positive ‘memento mori’ painting.
Here are three of the thumbnails I sketched out. In the end I decided to go with number 2 because it simplified the focus and used a stiffer posture for the woman.
Step 2: Reference Gathering
Now that I had my idea, it was time to gather references. Even though the image is straightforward, there were a lot of things to think about. To get the hands and the drape of the veil just right, I had my partner take a picture of me in the same pose. For the other elements I scoured the image section of Google. Sometimes I used parts of the images I found directly, other times I just used them as inspiration for the mood or colors. I wanted her clothing to be highly detailed, almost as if you could imagine the stitching on it, so I looked at a lot of clothing directly from the period. Lace is a real challenge!
Then each of the flowers used in the skull had to be researched to correspond with the appropriate Victorian flower language. I ended up going with poppies for eternal sleep and oblivion, purple hyacinth for sorrow, and rosemary for remembrance. The necklace came from an image I took myself at a museum exhibit I once attended. Inside is woven hair from the deceased loved one.
Step 3: Refining the Sketch
Before taking the sketch to its final form, I brought my thumbnails into Photoshop and did some quick value studies and composites. Then I went to town on the drawing. The final result was done with a mechanical #2 pencil on sketchbook paper.
Step 4: Transferring and Inking
Now that the sketch was complete, I put it onto my light box to trace onto the watercolor paper. For this I used 140lb Winsor & Newton hot press paper. I had intended to render the skull with watercolors and the figure with micron pens and watercolor, however when I put the sketch on the light box a beautiful effect happened, and I knew I wanted to try to capture its luminous quality in the final version of the painting. For the moment, though, I put that thought aside and concentrated on tracing and then inking. I used a 005 Micron pen for this task. It took hours, and was quite enjoyable if I do say so myself.
Step 5: Adding Color
Now came the time I had been dreading. First because I wasn’t sure what medium to use on the skull, and second because I was going to have to do the scary thing and cover up all that fancy ink work I had just done with dark watercolor. It was a challenge to make the varying degrees of black and not lose all of that, but in the end I’m very glad I had the guts to put the paint down. I use Daniel Smith and Winsor & Newton watercolors and a size 0 and 3 Sable brush. When it came time to do the skull, I printed out the image of the sketch on the light box and did some tests with watercolor, pencil, and colored pencil. The winner was a watercolor wash with Prismacolor pencils on top. There’s a time lapse video of one of the flowers on my Instagram feed.
I’m really happy with how this piece turned out. It was a nice challenge that wasn’t too frustrating, and allowed me to step back from large scenes and just do a portrait this time. I want to give my thanks to my SmArt School mentors this semester, Scott Fischer and Greg Manchess, as well as the rest of my class for helping me with critiques and suggestions for this piece!
Pretty soon I’ll have prints available of this lovely, but right now I do have products with this image on it available in my Society6 Shop.
