Girls who play dress-up

Lounging Girl with Mona Lisa’s Smile.

Here’s a few pieces from a series I’ve been working on. They are an outgrowth of my current preoccupation of texture and pattern. I’m working to bring more texture to my pieces, and it naturally evolved into a series of girls playing dress-up. I wanted to really get the feel of playing dress-up– touching old fabrics, brocade, chiffon, crinoline, velvet, feeling the raised patterns and textures of dusty, vintage clothes in all its luxuriously frothy but dusty glory. I also wanted the characters to look relaxed– rather than the formality of actually dressing up for a stiff event– with the playfulness and imagination of youth, trying on different adult personalities as easily as slipping on one of mom’s brides maid dresses from the back of her closet. I also wanted the clothes to look less than perfect and more homespun, handmade or antique.

Girl mirrors herself.

Dreaming of Casablanca.

81/2 x 11 Hard pastels, willow charcoal, ink, graphite pencil and soft pastel pencil

The paper I used is pretty cheap pastel paper, but archival quality. Its definitely my sketch paper, but since I’m in between paper orders, I just went for it. It’s quite thin and the texture is too bumpy. Even though it has a rough texture, there’s something resistant about it– the charcoals/pastels just didn’t settle into the crevices like they should. I had to work really hard to get the smooth, blended effect I was looking for and fine details had to be done with ink or pencil as the paper was too rough. This paper does come in nice, muted colors, though: yellow, blue, and green are the paper colors above. I think it might be from a Strathmore 300 pastel pad.

I definitely haven’t mastered the art transferring my stuff to digitial… I uploaded them and corrected the color and brightness in Picasa. It allowed me to preserve their brightness but the effect of pastel just didnt transfer in the digital version– you can’t see the velvet-y quality of the pastels. I’m going to have to look into how to get the best scans or photographs of them, so maybe I’ll do a post in the future on what I find out. I know there are also much better programs– like photoshop or Illustrator– out there where I can make more corrections digitally to capture the effect of the original. And, pastel probably doesnt get as nice scanned results as gouache, or acrylic.

I’ll probably be using these for my portfolio for now, but may sell them on etsy in a bit… more on this later…