Mermaid Circus Week 1

Mermaid Circus Cover

I have started on my on-line course with Jane Davenport and Teesha Moore and am erecting my big top.  So much fun and a really interesting group of people chatting away on its  Facebook group.  Really interesting to see what people are doing.  There are many different skill levels and just as many different styles and interpretations.

Our first assignment is to make a shaped art book and do collage mermaids or other creatures in it.  Although I loved the mermaid shaped pages, I did not want to do that many mermaids or that many drawings, I would never get the time or energy to fill it.  So I decided to do a circus tent cover for my Art Book and do fairly regular shaped pages so that i could do a variety of things in it.  I wanted to use the tent more literally and make the front cover where you walk in and then show the inside of the big top inside with the pages turning to show different acts.  I have set up a pinterest site with all these vintage circus photos which provided such great inspiration.

Detail of Top of Circus tent

I also wanted to do some layering of paper cutouts to give it a more 3D effect, something I have been toying with in the back of my mind for my other work.  This course gives me a great chance to try out new techniques and some different themes,

So these are the steps I took to do the front cover.

Sketches

I sketched a number of tents on scrap paper and did a mock up of the tent and sketched it out onto my good paper.

Underpainting

I then used acrylic paints to fill in the main colours and paint the bits I wanted to stick on.

Colour Pencil and Outline

Then I went over with my colour pencils to give it depth, I only used three colours for this as I did not want to take too long.  A light (a couple of shades lighter than the paint), medium (some shade as the paint) and a dark ( a couple of shades darker than the paint).  After I had roughly coloured them in I went over them with the white pencil to blend them in, and knock them back so they were not too bright.

Sign

Next came the black pen to do the outline, this highlights the shapes and brings it all together and I just like outlines, it gives my work a more graphic look.

The sign came next not sure if I am happy with this or not, but up it went, you just can’t agonise over things too much.

Detail of Seaweed and sea creatures

Looking at it I decided it need some more lift and put in the gold dots.  Then having another look I decided the tent was too plain and added the seaweed and the fish etc.

So that is how it was created, it will change before the end as I continue to work on the rest of it, but I will keep you updated.

Karen