Celestial Garden
- Kaaren Poole
- 11 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Last week, being part way through my latest art journal spread, I looked at the main character and asked myself “who is she?”
Well, now I know. She’s a fairy in a celestial garden.
So, this post is about how I got here from where I stopped last week:
As I worked on finishing up, it felt like I wasn’t doing much, but those relatively little additions and changes made a big difference.
In the finished piece, although she doesn’t have fairy antennae, she does have fairy wings.
She’s a fairy!
Her Wings
I only began working on the wing once I was sure that I was finished with all that’s under it. That’s because the wing was to be translucent so what was underneath would show through to some extent.
My first step was to add a coat of thinned gesso over the entire wing area to establish translucence. Then I used white paint and a liner brush to paint the swirly details. At that point, I added a coat of a beautiful interference pearl. Since that somewhat dulled the white details, I painted them again, then added the tiny whit dots and also tiny blue metallic dots from a gel pen.
I wish the wing stood out a little more, but painting something translucent white over a fairly pale blue background and then expected it to stand out posed a problem I wasn’t quite able to solve.
Details for the Celestial Garden
Except for the collage piece I added to extend her rose crown to the left, there wasn’t much more to do but add details to finish this piece.
I decided that the background is a celestial garden—a garden in the sky. So I left a lot of blue and even added a little more here and there. Then, for an ethereal touch, I added magenta swirly linework, white dots, spirals of white dots, and lots of white highlights in the flowers.
Although I didn’t want a strong border, I felt it needed a border of some sort. Also I wanted to push the white edge back a little, as I thought it drew too much attention to itself. So I got my blue metallic gel pen back out and just wrote all around the border. what it says isn’t really important. It’s just a description of the flowers in the garden and a few words about the quality of the light, air, and the occasional gentle rain.
The most fun part for me, though, was the gold and the iridescence. I used a gold gel pen for the gold linework. There’s a fairly wide band along the entire left side and a narrower band along the right side. And there are highlights of this same gold in the fairy’s hair.
I talked about the iridescence in the wing earlier.
The problem is that you can’t see either the gold or the iridescence unless you turn the page a certain way, so it’s hard to photograph. On the other hand, it’s interesting and a bit mystical to include details that are hidden unless you look just the right way.
This piece would have benefited from some meaningful text, but none came to mind nor did there seem to be a place to put it. Oh, well. The mystery of what this is all about remains hidden.
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