The Why

To create is to bring the whispers in your imagination to life.

Whether that is through painting them, sculpting them, negotiating them, dancing them, or writing them into existence.

When I create, this is how it feels. Like beautiful flowers budding into existence, blooming, and changing the air around me.  I feel powerful and blessed. When I employ my creator nature, I feel like a queen in a realm of my own.

I love engaging with the creations of other people, too. Looking through their eyes. Understanding what is important to them. Witnessing their process, their struggle, their essence is as much an honor as creating my own works.

This painting is dedicated to the painters, the jewelry makers, the photographers, the musicians, the dancers, and the writers. The brave souls who let us see through their eyes, who let us listen to the whispers of their imagination.

The Challenge

This was the second full-sized painting I did with all oil paint, and it was a little time consuming as I was still very much getting used to the medium.

I started with creating a reference. I created multiple AI generations for various elements of the piece and Frankensteined them all together to form a rough reference for myself.

Naturally, I changed much about this reference as I went. But it’s always important to have some kind of a guide when you are leaning into realism.

The biggest challenge was the complexity of the piece. There were many layers in the composition, and I was balancing working back to front in the composition with drying times for the paint itself. It required much planning and much adjusting of that plan.

Even the portrait aspect was more challenging than I had expected. Smaller portraits are less forgiving because if you are even the slightest bit off with one of the features, it’s obvious. And difficult to fix.

And then there were all the flowers. Most of the flowers were roughly translated from my reference, and some made up entirely. Only the roses were fashioned after real flowers in nature. I had to do a bit of finessing to get some of the flowers to look decent and to provide enough variety.

Before mentoring session

Adding more flowers

The Mentoring Session

The mentoring session was tremendously helpful. It was enlightening to learn from common mistakes.

And of course the direct feedback I received was most helpful. I think I tend to lean toward illustration in my artwork, and I initially had the figure seated in nothing but darkness. The story in my mind was that she was sitting in a dark room somewhere, filling the darkness with her imaginings. But Lioba recommended filling the space with more flowers.

While my original composition works in illustration, Lioba said she has found that people tend not to put portraits of people they don’t know on their walls. Adding more flowers took some of the emphasis off the figure and made it into more of decorative piece.

This was not something I had considered, and is something I think about as I move forward creating wall art.

She also recommended that I rework the objects coming out of the book, as they were so much smaller than the other objects. Enlarging those objects did give the piece more consistency, and I was grateful for the suggestion.

Getting critical feedback is helpful and essential at any stage of an artist’s journey. I found this critique session to be an invaluable experience.

Reworking the book

The Gallery

I had concerns when I saw everyone else’s submissions for the show because mine really stood out. They style was different, and almost everyone else had a close-up portrait.

But my piece was chosen and shown as part of the online “Echoes of Imagination” exhibit at the Curio Art Gallery.