Week Nine
November 28th through December 4th
For those of you that don’t know, Fae are often said to be spirits of nature or tricksters who would play pranks on humans. Also known as Faeries, they are supernatural creatures who appear to be as ancient as any Pagan deity.
About a million different ideas for a Fae character came to mind for this week's prompt. Choosing between one inspire by nature or by animals was the biggest task. Flowers, foliage, butterflies, bunnies, deer, there's just so much to choose from when creating a Fairy! Keep reading to discover which source of inspiration I chose.
The past couple of weeks have been pretty much a smooth ride to execute these challenge prompts, and I think I may have gotten a little too comfortable.
But don’t you worry, this week kind of kicked my ass for a while.
This may be something that is experienced with other forms of creativity, but often a painting will go through an awkward or even a straight-up ugly phase. You’re applying paint, adding details, building up shadows and highlights as you usually do, but this time it just is not looking good. You have two choices, really. You can give up entirely or you can hope to whatever invisible sky person, that your painting gets better. And if you choose to keep going, things could eventually start looking good or…. take a turn for the worse and even overwork the paper!
I almost always choose to push through the ugly phase. Either until I am happy with the direction it is going or until I have worked the piece into a muddy mess.
Well, that happened to me this week.
This painting reached an ugly phase so fucking bad it is totally cringe-worthy.
Can you guess just by the linework which kind of Fae I chose???
Please prepare yourself. The awkward stage is upon us. I’ll forgive it if you cringe on my behalf.
*Sigh*
Aaaaaaand there it is. At least now you can definitely tell I was attempting the foliage route. I had envisioned a majestic Fae with a mossy head of ‘hair’ cascading over her shoulders. But GODDAMN, this shit looks so bad. Panic settled in.
Three hours and a serious hand cramp later, and it still looked really quite terrible. But it was already Thursday evening, so I was committed.
Somehow, it miraculously came through the other side looking pretty okay. Mind you, a couple of the first ferns I painted looked pretty weird, but I had some super-secret plans to help with that.
When this concept came to me, I knew it would make the perfect mixed media piece and that had me so excited to work on it! This is, surprisingly, the first mixed media piece using preserved bugs, flowers, and foliage that I have done for any of the challenges the past six months.
After a lot of arranging and rearranging, the perfect composition of ferns, flowers, moss, and gold embellishment came together.
This piece turned out better than I thought it would. It just proves that perseverance can pay off, even when you think your work could never ever leave the ugly stage it's in. And even if it hadn’t turned out well, I still would have learned and grown as an artist. Which is the entire purpose of these challenges.
What do you think of my first mixed media challenge piece??? Let me know in the comments.
