This painting was completed in the spring of 2020 as the final project from my Illustration class my junior year at VCU. The professor had placed a focus on color and storytelling throughout the course, and wanted this project to be a culmination of those lessons. For the final, he assigned each student an Edgar Allen Poe short story to be illustrated in gouache.
My story was “Silence: A Fable” (I chose to focus on the moment from “It was night, and the rain fell…” to “- but the night waned, and he sat upon the rock” if you would like to take a look at the text).
This story thrusts the narrator into a surreal and sorrowful environment. The speaker spends the entire text trying to decipher what they are seeing around them and the horror they feel.
After some initial note taking from the story- I decided on the aspects of the description that I would hone in on in my illustration. I wanted to include the narrator themself, and while they would be a focal point, their face would be turned back into the scene. They would lead the viewer into the strange environment of the painting the same way the narrator leads the reader in the text.
I decided to use myself as the reference for this main figure as a way to further the idea of reading the story from my own perspective. The ominous glow of the moon- bathing the water and shores in red- at once felt like the key visual element to me. It is so otherworldly and threatening, providing such plentiful and unsettling light to the narrator’s horror. I got a red light bulb in order to get that perfect lighting in my reference photos. I put on my most nightgown-like dress and wet my hair so that I could appear as though I was just transported into this desolate scene and rose out of the blood-red river.
I selected my favorite composition from the first thumbnails and created a more specific pencil sketch.
I also took this sketch into Photoshop to get an idea for the color in the scene (though, this pass told me I needed much more red to match my reference images.)
I then began the final piece with a pencil drawing and laid the base color in acrylic paint. I kept this in a monotone red, hoping to carry that throughout the painting process.
By this point I had layered on more gouache and started bringing in details with highlights. This was also the time of the first round of critiques in the class. I could get some feedback and take a moment to step back and see what the piece needed.
In the final stage of the painting I wanted to make some revisions: refining the main figure- incorporating more details to bring it closer to the reference image, improving the the secondary figure- changing the pose and scale to work better with the scene, and then finally bring a cohesive level of finish to the details of to the flowers and the rest of the environment.
I’m very happy with where this painting ended up, and I am glad that it can stand alone as an independent illustration. While writing this journal, one aspect of the project that does still jump out to me. I have an itch to do something more with the reference photos that I took. I am very proud that I pushed myself to make a much more dramatic color choice than I would usually do. And now I want to do another painting (or even a series!) in oils and solely focused on the red figure from those photos.
Written October 2024