sigune | Art: The Beautiful Narcissa (G)

I predict that this week will be full of art posts :-). You can expect

seaislewitch's second picture, as well as the full images and sketches of my two submissions to

romancingwizard's latest challenge - and today you get my most recent experiment with watercolour pencils, courtesy of

sscrewdriver and what seemed at first to be a bad buy :D.

Do I love the twenties? I love the twenties! This was inspired by charleston-age fashion plates without being based on any particular one.

I know it's not spectacular, but I had been longing to do a very simple picture after having drawn a series of fairly complex ones (in my terms). The original idea - one which may as yet produce a result of its own - was to go for a simple, two-dimensional black and white lineart with large black areas, but then this bad buy happened, all because of

sscrewdriver ;-).

I am supposed to do a picture for her with ecoline colouring, which requires heavier paper than I possessed in A4 size, and I had been planning to get me some A4 watercolour paper anyway. However, my Remus and Tonks experiment has taught me something: all those brands of watercolour paper have different grains, even when they all state the grain is 'fine'. The coarser kind of paper give me trouble when transferring my pencil lineart onto it, plus the pencils leave a lot more pigment on the page than I think they do, which means I find myself incapable of controlling the mixture of the colours, a fact that is problematic for the skin tones among other things. So, after having used Cotman paper for my Christmas cards and Bockingford for Tonks and Lupin, I know that what Bockingford calls 'fine grain' isn't nearly as fine as Cotman's paper with the same label. Unfortunately, though, I couldn't find Cotman paper in a larger size. The trouble begins when you realise that the blocs of watercolour paper in the shop are all neatly wrapped in plastic: you can't see what the surface of the paper is like! So I gambled and bought some that I thought would be fine, only to unwrap it at home and discover that the grain is much courser than anything I have so far. Joy. In fact, the paper is even sort of vertically lined. Go me! It is totally impossible to do my regular lineart on this stuff, let alone transfer my pencils onto it.

But as usual when I buy something that doesn't turn out what it was meant to be, I felt the urge to prove that I could do something with it after all :D. I made what was frankly a very quick and spontaneous drawing in pencil, then inked it very loosely with my smallest Staedtler pen (005). Because this time I could anticipate the colour mixing problem, I used a bit of paper as a palette and mixed the skin tones there. As for the grey of the dress, I thought I would make use of the lines in the paper to suggest peplos-like folds - I was thinking of Fortuny's 'Delphos' evening dresses (mmmmm....).

So - well, here it is.

And I'm going back to the shop to take another stab at getting smooth watercolour paper :P.