August - Week 3

Written 26/08/2025, Edited 30/08/2025

Sketching ideas

So, I decided to combine my two main heritages - Welsh and Irish - and do a drawing of women in traditional Welsh dresses Irish dancing. So with that in mind, I wanted to have a mainly green (Irish) and red (Welsh) background for the watercolour.

Firstly, I decided to practise drawing people Irish dancing. I started by drawing from still photos (sorry for the slight blurriness, my phone camera is being a pain atm):

Multiple poses of women Irish dancing

This was fun to do, although it was surprisingly hard to find poses with the arms really rigid (which is what I think of Irish dancing as being).

Then, I decided to draw some dancing in MOTION. This was actually my partner's suggestion. This was rather challenging, but very fun! I think this was good to do as you can see I had to focus more on the actual forms (or even just their legs) and couldn't faff around drawing their outfits like I did from the photos. I do think the poses look more dynamic than the ones from photos so it definitely paid off!

Multiple poses of women Irish dancing

Next, I drew women (and girls) in 'traditional' Welsh dresses. The 'traditional' look is really a costume if I'm being honest. In more contemporary depictions of these women, they did have the hats and shawls but they were more 'hdoge-podge-, whatever fabrics they could get rather than a specific pattern (and not always red either!)

Several women and girls in traditional Welsh dresses

I then decided to focus on the watercolours, I will admit that although I originally wanted a blend of red and green because they are opposite colours on the colour wheel they ended up being a bit... muddy. While I know I could wait for the green to dry before adding the red this was more to get the base layer which I envisioned being wet-on-wet. So I think I will do a blend of greens (green is also on the Welsh flag after all) and then just use red for the dresses in the final piece.

Three swatches of watercolour, the top is pale green and crimson, the middle is a mix of green and red and the bottom is different shades of green (and looks the 'cleanest'

While the paint was drying, my silly cat thought she would be so smart and decided to walk all over the paint! Here is her paw print >:(

A green and crimson paw print on paper, a note says 'Teg's Paw >:('

After that I combined the Irish dancing with the Welsh dresses! This was fun to draw, I wasn't sure on whether I should alter the dresses to be shorter or if they should hold them up. The former would hew closer to my Irish side and the latter would hew closer to my Welsh side. Sooo, am torn to be honest!

Drawings of women Irish dancing while wearing traditional Welsh dress - also Teg's paw is there

Here is my plan for my final piece

Women in Welsh dress Irish dancing, in the background are women in Welsh dress on the right and women Irish dancing on the left. In the centre background are small stones in a circle

In my final piece the composition should be better (hopefully lmao), but I like the idea of them being asynchronous and less formal (as this blend of my heritage isn't meant to be some 'formal' thing). I also wanted to incorporate the white almost ghostly figures the original has, so I thought having the Irish dancers on one side and Welsh women on the other would work well. The middle is meant to be a stone circle, like there is at the Eisteddfod every year (but could be interpreted many other ways).

How the process is going

Despite being decently on track earlier on in the month, I ended up falling behind AGAIN. I started writing this blog before I had actually finished all of the sketching plans (oops!). I also wanted to do a painted version of my plan but because of how behind I have gotten I decided to scrap that and just do a pencil sketch (hope I don't regret that...)

Anything I have learnt

I have learnt that drawing from motion is really fun (though being able to rewind DEFNITELY helps XD).