Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Beatrix Potter

For Colour Collective's 'Pale Geranium Lake' prompt, I decided to draw a young Beatrix Potter in a field of poppies. It being the 150th anniversary of her birth this year, as well as Women's History Month (and International Women's Day just a couple of days before) it seemed like an apt topic. 


Obviously you can't draw Beatrix Potter without a bunch of bunnies (well, probably you can, but why fight it?) and I added a squirrel into the mix because squirrels are cute. Here's a detail:


I dropped a page of Beatrix Potter's own sketchbook (age 9) into the sketchbook. (You'll have to bear with me, I can not find where I found the double-page spread I used...) The figures are rabbits, all dressed up and doing things, although the original image I used was so small that I'm not entirely clear on what.... Some of them may be iceskating. 

There are quite a lot of photos of the young Beatrix floating around the internet, so I used a lot of them as references. If I go back in and fiddle with this piece, as I probably will (I'm always a bit rushed with my Colour Collective pieces), I think I should make her hair a bit darker. I got a carried away with the sunny summer atmosphere, and somewhere along the line she went a bit honey-coloured. Oops.

Image from Birnam Arts
Adobe Photoshop CC2015 with a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2. About 10 hours.

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