Crowned Spring

Are you ready to welcome Spring?

Why not take a canvas and celebrate a new season with paints and pencils? :)
We are sure Riikka's new project will inspire you to do so...

This canvas has a few inspirations.

First of all, there's a co-worker whose nickname is "king" and then there are my previous lady canvases.

Not so long ago one of my friends challenged me to share three works by me for five consecutive days and one of the triplets I shared were "leaps of faith". Those works were such that I took a leap and tried something new and I was totally prepared to fail.

They all turned out ok after all and one of those was my very first lady canvas. Seeing it again after some time made me see all the mistakes and things that I could improve. You can see where this is going, right? So I wanted to improve my skills and take another go.

 

My co-worker's nickname made me think of crowns and then all I had to choose was what kind of a crown I was doing.

I was on my way to work and grabbed my phone and googled "fantasy crown" - one of the pictures that popped to the screen was white crown with branch-like shapes and crystals. Especially those branches inspired me so I went with spring.

I tried to capture the tenderness and even the fragile nature of spring in my canvas. The branches are still bare but there's hints of green in her hair and painted on to the tree branches. There are also egg-styled shapes in the mix and a few flowers also.

Her hair is made out of feathers and soft wool and on top there's cobweb style thread. The background is painted with peach and pink shades and the halo behind her head should give an idea of the rising sun.

I used acrylic paints to paint the background and also gave the first coat of paint to the spring itself with those.
I then drew the features with PITT pens and a pencil.
To give the whole piece a dream-like haze, I used PanPastels on top to soften the edges.

Materials from Mixed Media Place: