This painting was created for Thinkspace Gallery’s 15-year retrospective exhibition. It was an open-themed group show celebrating the gallery’s life, and showcased over 70 new works of art. For my contribution I wanted to focus on my portrait series that I started years ago. The Mauve Girl is my interpretation of the modern Vietnamese woman, painted with acrylic and coloured pencil on wood panel.
The reason I began the series of portrait work was so that I could focus on colour exploration, floral design and the female gaze. For this portrait I wanted to express my heritage by depicting the Vietnamese woman in a non-traditional light. The painting juxtaposes the everyday female in a modern, translucent áo dài dress with lotus flower tattoos and brightly coloured hair. I kept her expression and demeanour soft while contrasting it with the harsh black lines of the tattoos.
Portrait painting is both complex and simple. Because there’s not a lot of components within it, I have to make sure the facial expression and subtleties of her mannerism are handled with care. The better I treat these little nuances, the more of her essence I’m able to capture.
How I create…
A FIGURE IN WATERCOLOUR AND PENCILS
Jan Wessbecher
Dominic Carter talks to the visual artist about creating his own comic and why sketchbooks are great for creative experiments
Kyounghwan Kim
The Korean character concept artist speaks to Dominic Carter about staying open to ideas and the value of drawing regularly
Slawek Fedorczuk
Dominic Carter talks to the concept artist about what keeps him motivated and the advantages of using physical sketchbooks.
Raquel M. Varela
Raquel is inspired by magic, fantasy and fairy tales. She loves designing female characters from distant worlds. \"My greatest reference is Loish's art, thanks to her I learned to draw the movement and fluidity I like to convey.\"
Estrela Lourenço
Estrela is a children's book author and illustrator. Her work is influenced by her background in character animation and storyboards for clients such as Cartoon Network, and she channels comic strips like Calvin and Hobbes.
Daria Widermanska
Daria, also known as Anako, has been drawing for as long as she can remember. Inspired by Disney and classic anime, she loves creating new characters and often finds that a single sketch can spark a unique story.
Allen Douglas
Allen has been painting professionally since 1994 for the publishing and gaming industries. Inspired by folklore, he distorts the size, relationships and environments of animals, and calls his paintings 'unusual wildlife'.
Thaddeus Robeck
Thaddeus has been drawing from the moment he could hold a pencil, but it was the 2020 lockdowns that gave him the time to focus on honing his skills.
DRAW FASCINATING SYMBOLIC ARTWORK
Learn how JULIÁN DE LA MOTA creates a composition from his imagination with a focus on crafting figures, volumetric modelling, and light and shadow
First Impressions
The artist talks about his journey into the mythological world
