The second year part-time MA Illustration students are working on a collaborative publication, which involves us as illustrations responding to the Creative Writing BA class' pieces from a recent trip to Cliffe Castle (where we also visited).
A lot of the pieces really spoke to me but the below was the poem I decided to work from first:
Calls to the people ‘do a good deed’
Watches them weep and clutch their prayer beads
Then leave her in the pond to die, to bleed
Using a free photo reference from Adobe Stock, of a girl laid in grass, I created the above using gouache, wax pastel, pencil and watercolour brush pens. I wanted to keep the water shallow and green like a garden pond, with lots of texture and energy in the water in comparison to the figure being still and muted, surrounded with specs of flowers, grass and reeds. I thought about how it might look printed alongside the poem, and wanted to keep the edge unfinished so it blended into the page.
Doing this pieces has reminded me that its the energy and texture that I love to see in my work, when I think less and focus more on how I feel then how things should look. A very fun and enlightening exercise.