Six Fairies and a Marble
Coloured pencil over paper stained with gouache, 23.5 x 17.8 inches, 2003.
'Six Fairies and a Marble'
This picture was done by painting the background first, with gouache, and then washing it all off again... so that the paper is actually stained with gouache paint but still has a 'papery' surface suitable for drawing on. The pencils are rather translucent, giving the fairies a rather ghostly look. I'm not sure where the fairies are - tumbling through some in-between dimension that only fairies (and probably dragons) can inhabit, I suspect.
'Six Fairies and a Marble' - larger image
The composition rather made itself up for this one - I remember I did it by drawing a lot of unrelated fairies, tumbling about, and then cut them all out and fitted them together - they got a little modified after that, so that they interacted with each other, but not much. There was a gap, though - which didn't seem to need another fairy - but needed something. A marble suddenly seemed to be the answer. There's something magical about marbles - especially the old-fashioned ones with the little twisty bit in the middle of it - a sort of frozen little world inside them, and I always had a thing about marbles. Actually I got a first in jewellery design at college, based on a collection of pieces of jewellery with marbles in them. You have to buy a lot of marbles to find the right ones though, and as a result I have way too many marbles around than a girl in her mid-thirties ought to have. Fairy marbles are probably very special...