This is the 2nd post about commissions – hop on over here to see Part 1 where I talk about the digital illustrations I made for a workbook

The other commission I received around about the same time was for a much larger reproduction of a very small watercolour and ink piece called Fae Queen that the client had seen on my Instagram. The original piece was around A7 – which is a ‘normal’ A4 bit of office paper folded in half (A5), in half again (A6) and then in half again! (A7). The client wanted this to be around A3 size to use as art for her hallway.

I had never made a watercolour piece that large before, so I knew that working on that scale was going to be interesting and a little bit outside my comfort zone, especially because the original piece had very simple details to describe the features of the Queen. I wasn’t sure that simplicity would work scaled up and didn’t know if the techniques I used when working on small pieces would scale up either so it was going to be a bit of an adventure.

The client wanted the image mostly the same with just some very minor tweaks to some of the colouring, so the next challenge was figuring out how to scale up the image. I ended up getting my calculator out to figure out the dimensions needed so I could do a basic sketch. If I was to do something like that again I would take a completely different approach – I would scan in the original, scale it up digitally, print it out, and then trace it onto the paper. But hindsight is always 20-20 (even in 2021.. baBOOM!).

Once I had worked out the maths to scale the image up, the next step was in re-drawing my Fae Queen and the background. I sketched it out lightly in pencil, adjusting the lines slightly until I was happy with it, then I inked in the lines.

With that complete I started mixing my paints. I had created a beautiful blue-green shade using two colours from a very old Windsor and Newton palette that my grandmother had passed on to me. Trying to mix enough of this shade to cover large swathes of an A3 sheet was actually quite time consuming – those paints are “student grade” which are harder to activate, so my poor brush got a bit of a bruising being swirled around and around and around in the pans to pick up the colours. In the end I almost completely finished the blue pan I’d used (I think this was Cobalt Blue, but a replacement Windsor and Newton Cobalt Blue isn’t quite the same shade, so maybe not…) and I almost ran out of the mix before I’d finished.

Because it was a mixed colour, and because of how watercolour works, I couldn’t stop part way through to mix up another batch – it would be almost impossible to get the same exact shade, and the delay to remix would create drying lines. There are no drying lines in the original piece so I didn’t want to include them in the reproduction.

However, I made it – there was just enough of the mixture to complete the painting.

Next I added the ink to create the dark background. Working in this order meant I didn’t have to be completely precise with the watercolour edges as they would be covered by black ink (top tip!). Then I moved on to colour in the moon behind her. This was a mixture of watercolour and Copic Opaque White which creates a very opaque, strong white that I like working with.

I added the final touches with metallic watercolours, both for the crown, the magic and the splatters.

Because of the proportions of the painting, there were two long, thin side panels that were unused. I decided to turn these into abstract side panels that could be trimmed off to use as bookmarks, or kept on for an interesting effect depending on what the client preferred.

I painted on them with the two colours used to create the mixture, and added rock salt to create an interesting texture to complete the piece. And the very last touch was my signature.

Working on two completely different commissions at the same time was great – I could hop between them when I need a break from one, giving my subconscious a bit of time to work through whatever needed processing on one of the pieces before heading over to the other. This commission took much less time than the workbook design and illustration as it was only one image, and it was essentially a reworking of an already existing piece – so the creative part was mainly complete and there was more focus on problem solving. That said, it still took longer than I thought it would!