Monday, June 05, 2006

Illustration Friday



Portrait: this is a portrait of two of the girls I used to teach in Song Luo elementary school. They are both in 3rd grade, members of the Taiyal tribe, and despite their calm in this portrait, actually a hurricane of groping hands and eager demands. They speak minimal English thanks to me, minimal Taiyal thanks to the erosion of the language, and, i think, are so beautiful.

8 comments:

Amy Farrier said...

this is gorgeous, especially where the green and purple mix. nice spare portrait.

° said...

lovely watercolor like your color selection

Katarina said...

a great technique! how did you do that?

TESSA said...

this is great, i like the negative space, the cool colors give this piece a nice feeling for it. awesome

Katherine Mann said...

i made this piece with a relief technique and watercolor. first i covered the entire paper with artists tape, then cut into the tape with an exacto, cutting a pealing out the tape on the sections where i wanted color (but not cutting through the paper). when i finished creating this stencil i filled in the negative space with watercolor, waited for it to dry, then took the rest of the tape off--simple and not as time-consuming as it sounds. :)

Katarina said...

that sounds pretty interesting,
thanks for the specification!

Katherine Mann said...

wow, i just read what i wrote in my last comment and it makes no grammatical sense: sorry! what i was trying to say is basically that i make a stencil using tape and fill it in with watercolors. but thats only if you want a really straight clear line. a lot of this piece was just done by hand with a lot of paint on the brush to make a clear edge. then photoshopped a bit to make it pop.

Katarina said...

i haven´t even noticed the lost grammatical sense... ;)

but i got what you mean! so, thanks again for explaining your technique!