The Flower project

In the past couple of months, I started working on a personal project centered on flowers and their role in myths, legends, and religions throughout history. Like most people, I enjoy looking and savoring the smell of flowers. They are a marvel of nature and a balm for the eyes and the spirit. My love for them, however, is not matched by my knowledge of them. I am terrible at remembering their names as well as the names of plants in general, both in Italian and English! What to do about that?

Many years ago an Italian journalist, Alfredo Cattabiani, wrote a book, Florario, about the meanings of plants and flower in different cultures. I don't know if it has been translated in other languages,

My mom bought it for me and I began to read it, but my teenager self found it too dense and erudite for my tastes. So I decided to put it aside for when I would have reached a more mature and reflexive age. Apparently this is the time! When I went to Italy last summer, I recovered it from my old bedroom's bookcase and took it back to the US to give it another try. After perusing it, more than 20 years later, I still think it's best taken in small bites (I have a short attention span!), yet it's a fascinating summary of flower lore that I find very inspiring.

My plan is to follow the book, chapter by chapter and dedicate to each flower an illustration that evokes not onlythe natural beauty of flower or plant but also the symbolisms and stories that such beauty has inspired in humans in the ages past. I will finally learn my flower nomenclature... and hopefully much more!

I started with roses in Sub Rosa. I left several meanings out, by focusing on the love and secret symbolism. I followed with the Lotus of Creation, that I am about to complete (I got stuck because one crucial marker needed an ink refill and I could not bring myself to go to Blick's to buy it! ...it's to cold: I just want to stay home!!!).

Well, of course I knew what roses and lotuses looked like, but I am sure I will soon encounter several names that have to find a "face"(or viceversa "faces" that will finally find a name).

Hope you'll stick with me in this discovery journey.
Talk to you soon! :)

Coloring....

Ok, here is the promised update. It's not much, but I am proceeding cautiously. To give you an idea, it took me a couple of hours (while watching Iron Man 3 with my husband...not very poetic or attuned to the theme of the drawing, but time is precious...;)) colored the central  more prominent rose. Now I am getting a bit faster with the other roses, because I figured out the technique I need to use.

I like my roses very much, for once. I liked the fairies very much too at the beginning, but I am not so sure of it anymore. Their skin color is quite flat and I believe I need to work more on it to bring the little creatures to life. BTW, notice that this time I started from the main characters! ;)

Have a great rest of the week!

Ritratto di Bimba (Bella's Portrait) finished

It's done. And I think I sort of saved it.
Thank goodness for my husband's constructive criticisms and the mixed media approach that allowed me to correct at least partially my mistakes with pencils!

What did I change?
-Her eyes were/are not aligned. I used a dark brown pencil to redraw the lower and upper lids outlines to create the illusion of new boundaries.
-Her lips were vampire-like, way to red and dark, like if blood had congealed on them (yuk!). I used a white pastel pencil to tone down the redness.
-Her smile was sort of uncertain, so with a dark violet and brown pencils I pushed the corners of her mouth further sideways and upward.
-Then I used  dark and reddish brown pencils to define better her cheeks and the smile-puffiness under her eyes (what do you call those thigies?...8 month old kids cannot possibly have "bags" under their eyes!).
-After this, I darkened the left side of her face, because somehow it looked too broad before. This also, I think, helped giving a more 3-dimentional look to the face.
-I added wisps of hair here and there, to avoid the impression she was wearing a lopsided wig.
-Finally, I toned down the contour of her face and collar overlapping white pastel pencil to the too severe and bold multiliner sign.

I think that's about it.
I feel better about it, now...so I think I can safely hang it in Bella's room without making her cry in fear of creating an unpleasant "mommy thinks I am ugly" complex. ;)

Hope you guys are all happy and enjoying this beautiful September day. Hugs and kisses,
Astera and family!

Portrait of Bella in progress

Hei there! How are you guys? After my summer vacation, I came back to a ton of work, daycare-born weekly colds, and unavoidable evening exhaustion. The most stressful times are gone, though, so I have a measure of tranquility that allows me to draw again. In fact, I have picked up the portrait I started in June  and am finishing it.

Here is a glimpse to the work in progress:

I got stuck on the inks, because the lamp in the living room that I normally use to work broke and we needed to get a new one. That and the fact that after dinner I just wanted to curl up doze off while watching TV...

Once the inks were finished, the fun part began and coloring has been relatively fast.I enjoyed a lot coloring the dragon!

So, after coloring everything, I started working on the face, which is unusual. Usually, the face gets colored first, because I usually have a pretty clear idea of what I need to do and it's a lot of fun, plus I tell myself that if I make a mess I can start over by transferring everything and giving it another try without too much grief. Instead, this time I was so happy with the lineart that, modestly speaking, I had no doubt, the coloring of the face would be very easy. I started with the skin, with which I was pretty happy. Then I proceeded to the mouth and the eyes...which turned out way too dark...now she looked like a not-so-pretty vampire.  Plus, with colors, all the irregularities and symmetry issues that I could not see in the inks became very clear. Why do I always miss these flaws until the very last moment? Looking at it in the mirror (I know I should have done this ages ago!) showed all the problems even more obviously...how to fix them?

Spring is here...the magnolia is blooming!

Finally, spring seems to have begun. OK, today the sky is all grey and heavy with rain, but the grass  is turning to emerald and  the first flowers are popping up here and there. Such a cheering sight!

Last October we moved to a new, bigger house so now we have a backyard...with a magnolia tree (a small one, though) in it. I did not realize it for quite a while, until somebody pointed it out to me and I was overjoyed. I adore magnolia trees. Where I grew up, we did not have them, but a few years ago I discovered them around town: smallish and shrub like (such as mine) or massive, old and majestic, all laden with luscious, gorgeous flowers in infinite variations of white, pink and cream. What a spectacle!
The magnolia has been my favorite tree ever since. At the time I even made a drawing, partially inspired by Enchanted Dolls, that celebrates them, Lady Magnolia.

I am told that it's pain to clean the mess when the flowers fall, but I don't care: the delight of seeing them every morning during the month of April is well worth the extra work. ;)

For weeks now, I have been keeping an eye on my beloved plant, at its furry gems (scientific name unknown to me!) green and tightly closed, tossed by the winds, covered in snow, hammered by torrential rains...and wondered when they would come to life. Yesterday, after a few days of sweeter temperatures the tree has awakened. The gems are opening! I so look forward to seeing what color and shape the petals are . From what I can see so far, it looks like they might be white, but...who knows...

...I'll keep you posted.

I am working on two new pieces, one for an italian contest about travels and one for my nephew Pit (but maybe I could also use it to enter another contest ;)). I'll post the WIP in a few days.

For now, be well and enjoy the delicate beauty of spring!

Madame Mayple

Dear friends, how are your vacations proceeding? I went back to work a couple of days, but things were pretty slow, as you can imagine and so it was not too bad. Today I am back on holiday and I take advantage of the free time to catch up with you.
Christmas was fun and pleasantly spent celebrating with the Italian friends that have become our family here in the USA. Now we are getting ready for New Year's Eve. This year nobody felt like cooking so we decided to try for the first time to go and eat out...I'll let you know how that works out for us...

Going back to art, I wanted to show you this WIP and final drawing. It's my gift to my friend Mayple (Monika Victoria) of The long lost wood. She is an amazing professional artist I met on the Enchanted doll forum and I greatly admire. This year, she is having the adventure of a lifetime: she left her native Australia to tour Europe. She is now living in Hungary where she is working full time on her art. Her paintings are delicate and daunting, ethereal and full of life. Go have a look if you don't know her already. She is also on flickr.
It has been a particular Christmas for Mayple and I wanted to make her feel she is not alone, although far away from home and her dear ones. I also wanted to thank her for the art she has sent me (still in the mail I am afraid...as soon as it gets here, I'll show it to you all  ;)...sometime snail mail is maddening...). Anyways, since she loves 18th Century costumes and she is now in Europe, I thought I would make an attempt to portray her as a lady in costume with a backdrop of the land of her ancestors. Therefore, I referenced one of the pictures she has published on her blog and that I like a lot for the beautiful light and for the sweet  and intent expression of her face, which I thought well represents her character, even if we never actually met in person. It must have been a good choice of reference because for once I did not have to struggle to reproduce the feature of my subject. In a matter of a couple of hours, I had the pencils and inking done...I know that's not fast by any means, but for my standards it's like being Speedy Gonzalez!


Then the fun began. I wanted to show her as if she was standing on the balcony of a palace overlooking a Hungarian landscape. Thus the drapery on the back and the flowers on the left. At this point I had not yet researched ideas for the background, but I had very clear ideas about the colors of the dress and the flowers in her hair (the latter being a typical feature of real life Mayple...her up-does are adorable. :)). So I quickly worked on these aspects and on the floral composition. I am not sure that the amount of work I put in that vase was called for, because as you will see in the final product, it becomes kind of lost in the background. Alas, you have probably noticed by now that I cannot resist focusing on tiny (and often irrelevant) details...

As I started working on the drapery in the back I realized that more depth of color-shadows was required by the character skin, so every once in a while I went back and add a new layer of color, although i was always a bit concerned about overdoing it. And in truth, there was a moment when I decided to use a particularly dark blue violet shadow on her cheeks and forehead that made me fear for the worst...Immediately after the sudden defection of the beige I was using to smooth things up put me in a panic. You should have see how terribly scarred by diagonal stripes was poor Mayple's face...My husband heard a desperate scream and wanted to see what I had done but I could not bring myself to show him....and I feel I had to act quickly...so I looked for alternatives in the palette and fortunately found a couple of earth tones that saved the whole thing (after tons of layers, of course). Too bad I don't recall the details of what copics I actually used (I worked on this piece before Thanksgiving), although I remember that Brick Beige was the one marker that stopped working and created the whole mess.

After fixing the skin issues and having completed the foreground, I started looking for a background. I found a beautiful picture on Google that depicted the Balaton region and I decided to reference it. I tried to figure out who took the picture but could not...it's a very popular image, used in a gazillion sites...if anybody knows the author I'll be happy to give her/him the due acknowledgement.

The background was more relaxing of a job and everything went pretty smoothly. As you can see in the picture above, I first used a light shade of grey to set out the outlines of the landscape and to prevent the colors of the sky and the fields from becoming too bright and dominant. Despite this precaution, the business of the clouds in the sky was a bit distracting, so I used my Derwent pastels pencils (mainly white) to tone down the contrast there....

And here is the final result:

 

Happy New Year!