Hello everyone!
It’s been a while since I created a small illustration from sketch to final piece in one go. This used to be a fairly common practice for me, especially during the pandemic. Nowadays however, I can’t seem to sit still for more than an hour or two without needing to either go outside, find Ed and distract him and/or hear a bird call I don’t recognise that needs immediate investigation.
The process video below was going to be another attempt at the scene with the shoe that I just can’t quite nail (more on that later this month though as I think I’m almost there with it….I’ve said that before). But, I’d just bought some new watercolours that I wanted to test out and folklore is in my head a lot at the moment. I had to do some reading prior to my MSc interview, and I went down the rabbit hole of fairy tales and how they can be interpreted psychologically. SO GOOD.
My plan for this folklore painting went a little bit like this;
Open Welsh folklore book to random page and draw that thing.
Find reference images online to help guide sketches.
Sketch with graphite in my sketchbook; play with potential composition (I never take enough time on that).
No pressure paint to paper time. No sketching onto the paper. No lightbox. Just blobs of colour and some line for details.
Here’s what my page landed on; Fairy Knockers (yes I could well have interpreted this as something else but stick with me less innocent minded humans). The following excerpts from my book explain a bit more about these fairies, which actually were seen favourably.
“Fairy Knockers (lol) or Coblynau.
The Coblynau or Knockers (lol) were supposed to be a species of Fairies who had their abode in the rocks, and whose province it was to indicate by knocks, and other sounds, the presence of ore in mines…