Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

 

This painting was started ten years ago. Really. Sometimes it takes me a while to get back to working on certain projects, but this is ridiculous. In this year's blistering Phoenix summer, I had just moved apartments. I had finally gotten a bigger one, one in which I could turn the bedroom into a studio/library/geek room. After the exhausting move (I have a lot of boxes of  books), I was looking forward to the cooled-off season which is supposedly autumn in the desert. It usually starts mid-October...if we're lucky. 
     

I unpacked my art supplies and looked at my Stack of Unfinished Pictures™, and this one of John Keats, based on his ode, "To Autumn," was at the top of it.

Back in 2013, I had even written a very early blog post on The Watcher Tree about it. I called that particular post "Starting Keats...(Part 1)" ...

...but I never did get around to "Part 2."

If you want to see all of the early steps of preparation and my slow process on this painting, I've got you covered in that post, which includes a lot of progress photos. This is how long it takes for me to work in color: it's a precarious balancing act for me. 

And so, here we finally are—a decade later.

I thought I needed to get 'To Autumn" done for Autumn 2022 and it would be the first thing I put on my drawing table in my new apartment.

A little about my idea here: I have a recurring leaf-haired Autumn Fairy character in many of my old paintings from the '90s, when I had practiced with watercolors and gouache for the first time.

Autumn has always been my favorite season, maybe because that's when my birthday is. I love the change of colors in trees, I love pumpkins and Halloween—and yes, as you may have suspected, I drink pumpkin spice coffee by the gallon.

Autumn is my special muse, too.

Fun fact: John Keats was born on Halloween, and he had a fondness for cats, which is why I included the black kitten who is fascinated by his feather quill pen. And I just have a special love for black cats, anyway.

The painting is really a cornucopia of mixed media. I used gouache, ink pens and ink brushes, colored pencils, chalk and even acrylics. I had adopted a large set of acrylic paints left behind at my workplace, and I'm still navigating how to use them. I do prefer the matte quality of gouache to the shinier look of acrylics, but a cool thing is that gouache and acrylics can be blended together. Gouache plays well with other media.

Experimenting is FUN, kids!

It's been quite a while since I finished a full color painting, and this one is a little bigger than my usual working size. Its large size also contributed to my putting it aside (continuously) to work on smaller illustrations.

Once I thought I had done all I could with it, I taped it around all the edges to a board, carried it outside and then photographed it in the sunlight. I picked the best of the photographs and then tinkered with it in Photoshop, brightening, sharpening, and getting rid of the usual cat hair that ends up everywhere. (Or sometimes it's my own hair I find, too.) 

After ten years in the making, it's FINALLY done!

Have you ever spent this long on a piece of artwork, or put something aside that you picked up years later? And who is your favorite poet and why is it John Keats?

Happy Equinox and season of mists!