The making of the three green ladies.

The Three Green Ladies began with the theme of the exhibition “Nature reimagined”. I came across an old book of folktales that center around nature ‘Earthcare, World Folktales to Talk About’ By Margaret MacDonald. And as I read the Three Green Ladies I could picture the three trees in my mind and was inspired to create a tree entwined with the female form.

At the same time I was trying my hand a making my own watercolour paints using the fabulous book “Natural Watercolour Paint Making’ by Joanne Green. The idea that the image of nature would be created by handmade paints srtaight from nature pleased me so I set about making a green and a brown to paint the majority of the piece with.

Making paint.

The beautiful dark mossy green I used for the leaves is made using red onion skins boiled and reduced down to form an ink. I followed the directions in Joanne’s book exactly to make this colour and I was really pleased with the results. It goes on deep red and as the PH shifts when it dries it ends up green. It took a little practice to get used to painting with it but I love the way I could create a really dark green for the dark area behind the leaves and then add different amounts of water to create different levels of light.

The design.

Sketching the design on my ipad is the first step in my process. Once I am happy with composition I move on to planning the paint side of things. I will take a section of the sketch and test out colours, methods and layering techniques. Each ‘practice’ piece I look at what I like and don’t like about it and try again. I try to use paper most similar to what the final piece will be on. My preference is 300gsm hot pressed 100% cotton paper.

Painting.

The Tree trunks took some practice to get right. At first they came out flat and lacking depth so I played around with adding light and dark blooms of brown before adding the contour lines over. It took some experimenting and reworking to get the contour lines right, I was looking for a balance between body and trunk and if I had more time I think I could have spent endless time getting it just right. I was hoping for the bodies to be less obvious but not too tree like!

The leaves were painted Light to dark. I drew each leaf, three layers of leaves. It took some practice to get them to overlap just right so that no two shades of colour sat next to each other ensuring that each leaf was defined. I increased the water to ink ratio and did a light wash over the whole thing. Then I mixed in less water to ink for the second layer of leaves, leaving the lightest leaves alone. Finally I used the ink with very little water at all to fill in the darkest areas.