When the covid-related quarantine began back in March I had this idea to start a big watercolor piece that would be constructed out of people's submissions. Imagine a large painting that is like a weird salad where everyone's thoughts, memories, dreams and ideas are mixed in a bowl and dressed with my imagination - well, after about two months of work it's finally here and I'm happy to share it with you.
I received over a thousand submissions on Instagram (yes I almost lost my mind a little) and spent a while picking the ones I felt would be a good fit, and without sketching or planning too much I started adding those to a big beautiful watercolor sheet that was there for a special occasion.
I decided to visualise people's submissions straight onto paper and then began to outline them without creating a sketch or planning a layout - I wanted to keep the whole process quite raw and intuitive. It's possible I didn't come up with the perfect placement for things, but the creatures and the objects landed where they wanted to sit and became a big organic (yet pretty weird and alien) family.
Here are just a few submissions that made it into the painting to give you a taste of what was feeding my brain:
Here is the finished painting, sized around A1.
I recorded quite a bit of my process (with a few comments) - some people mentioned it helped seeing the steps and hearing me chat gibberish. Check it out if you have a spare couple mins!
That's that. I will be offering limited-edition signed giclee prints -
if you want one as well, follow this link.
That's it! Thanks a lot for scrolling.
I hope you're safe and well and that your spring-summer 2020 has been a time for some good time with yourself that brought back some positive change.
And if not - that's okay, too. It will get better.
Stay strong!
I hope you're safe and well and that your spring-summer 2020 has been a time for some good time with yourself that brought back some positive change.
And if not - that's okay, too. It will get better.
Stay strong!
