Description
The Big Bottomed Woman began on Pinterest. As I was just starting to emerge from my wilderness phase, I thought I should find some images I liked and then draw them to get back in practice of drawing the human body. Now living on one salary with a young child and another on the way, I couldn’t make it to Sue’s Life Drawing Sessions, no matter how reasonably priced they were. Several hours later, (Pinterest is so addictive!) I found this image and well… I always love a good round bumcee (Trini slang for bottom).
The way the mud made the fabric follow her curves and the lines of movement they created, oh yes! I definitely wanted to interpret this in paint somehow but first, I needed to remove the rust… from my fingers. I hadn’t drawn people since that life drawing class in July. In fact, I hadn’t drawn anything since then! Some practice was in order and with a toddler and a giant baby bump, grabbing some pencils and a sketch book when a free 10-min gap appeared was easier than grabbing pastels or paint.And so it began. My sketch book must have been in shock after being neglected so long!
Then I used oil pastels to test my BBW (Big Bottomed Woman, no laughing please 😉 ) in colour.
The result was nice enough, but it didn’t really inspire me. The next time I got a chance to play with my BBW it was my monthly painting day at Frog’s Folly Studio with Belinda. My only toddler-free day each week so I was off to play, I mean paint!
Beautiful, I love the strength of blue. Now what? I hit a wall. I’d brought a canvas board with me but honestly, I was just copying this image over and over trying to stimulate my imagination to produce something. I hadn’t done a proper painting just from my imagination in a while and honestly I didn’t know where to go with this. So I followed any idea that popped into my head and the following images show how things progressed
And then I truly was stuck. I stared at the canvas blankly until Belinda took pity on me and came to have a look. “Why don’t you try to treat her more like a collection of shapes than lines?” This is why I think Belinda is a real artist and I am seriously flying by the seat of my pants! Shapes huh… No clue what she meant by that in terms of what to do next, but about 30 minutes later my fingers started picking colours, loading the palette and applying stuff. I just followed and tried not to think too much.
Oh wow! I love this! I’d love to just end the piece here. It’s stunning… but so obviously unfinished. Sigh!
So then I paused… for months. Then Val had a Mixed Media workshop and I went. God bless the hubby for understanding my need to get in as much creative re-birthing as I could before the baby arrived. I could feel my imagination waking up but it wasn’t quite there yet. I was loving the process of slowly coming alive and was truly scared that this 2nd child would be the end of my little renaissance. So I piled in as many creative opportunities as I could before my due date.
I did a piece for my unborn daughter over the course of 2-days at Val‘s workshop, but the workshop was a wealth of ideas for my Big Bottomed Woman. So on my next toddler-free day, I was ready!
I began to emphasize the shapes I found on her body with pieces of card to make those shapes rise up. Then tissue paper was added to create the fabric flow that I loved so much. I was seriously tempted to ‘paint’ with tissue paper and it’s a technique I may well try on another piece later on. Worth exploring for sure!
Stupidly, I was so into the piece at this point, I forgot to take a picture of the finished texture layer. Sorry! I decided to sort out my background next, so I took a black sharpie and wrote these words over and over on the dark blue areas.
“Rolling, wading, striding, strolling
Statuesque beauty, voluptuous pride
Easing, flowing, spreading, smiling
Radiates confidence, rises with the tide.”
Then I washed out the words a bit with some blue acrylic ink so they were visible but not overpowering. After that, I got palette knife happy and attacked the texture with paint. Sometimes, the palette knife was too hard so I used bits of card when I wanted a bit more give in my paint application. I also decided not to mix the paints too much, just overlap them on the canvas and see what happened.
The hair was the hardest part. I am still not sure whether the gold colour I eventually chose was right. I love the piece but the hair bothers me. Also, I’ve noticed that I made an error in that her face should be in shadow because he hair blocks the light but in my fiddling with the hair, I shifted it and now her face should not be in shadow, but it still is. Ah well! I figured that out AFTER I glazed it, so I think we’ll call this one done for now and just let that one go under the guise of artistic license.
Here she is in all her voluptuous glory. Flaws and all, she is beautiful and her beauty is made even more stunning by the fantastic framing job Essex Framing did for me.
This woman (and her bottom) served her purpose – I now felt creatively unblocked and I felt ready to paint again, I mean really paint. Bring it on!
UPDATE, 5 May 2017: I said she was done, but if I’m honest, her face never felt quite right. So I thought I’d fix that by lightening the facial complexion to match her back. Still, something wasn’t quite right and that is when I got the bright idea to forget having a face altogether! And so now that her back is completely to us, and only the back of her head can be seen… now! She’s done. (And apparently it was the right decision because within a few weeks she was sold too!Whoop! Whoop!)
