August - Week 4

Written 02/09/2025

Final piece!

Welsh Ladies Irish Dancing

A watercolour of three women in traditional Welsh dresses doing Irish dancing. The background is a swirl of different shades of green. There are white ghostly figures of Welsh women and of Irish dancers in the background

The theme

The theme is an embrace of both my Welsh and Irish heritage :) How cultures can mix and intertwine and that is an amazing thing that adds to both.

Thoughts on the process

The process was pretty smooth in the end, the part that took me the longest was definitely drawing the women in their poses, and the next longest thing was waiting for the paint to dry before applying the next layer! Mixing the watercolours for the backgrounds was pretty fun, just letting it whoosh around and dotting the darker bits on the wet paper did end up making a cool looking effect. I do wish I had been a bit more free with the red but I was worried about it potentially looking a bit muddy. I do think the red pops and stands out pretty well though :) I do wish I had been bolder with the backgrounds as I forgot that watercolour dries paler than it looks when wet.

I bought a white acrylic pen for the white bacgrounds, which was a LOT less fiddly than using a paintbrush I must say! It did take a few layers for it to be properly white, since it did blend with the green at first.

Funnily enough, I thought outlining the details would take me AGES since the drawing took me several hours, but I was done with with in less than 30 minutes XD, I do think the most annoying aspect (especially from a photography aspect) was that even though I was using watercolour paper, it still curled at the edges! UGH!

The progression of my piece can be viewed HERE

Comparison with inspiration

A watercolour of three women in traditional Welsh dresses doing Irish dancing. The background is a swirl of different shades of green. There are white ghostly figures of Welsh women and of Irish dancers in the background
Three Native American men wearing wings dancing. In the background are four figures in white and a pole with a fish stuck at the top

I will say, again, my camera is AWFUL at capturing certain colours (pale colours especially) and tends to artifically add contrast and/or wash colours out (and if I turn this off the photos are poor quality so a lot of details are lost). Honestly this is making me think I should invest in buying an actual camera rather than just using my phone XD

I do think that the influence is very clear in this piece, I think since I was less trying to mimic an artistic style but more of a 'compositional' style? That is, figures dancing in a blended watercolour background. I wish I had been braver with the colours but I definitely had a fear of 'ruining' the piece and having to redraw everything on a new piece of paper (and I don't have a whole lot of good watercolour paper so I am want to waste it). That is something I will need to toss up in the future.

Despite my best efforts I do feel like there is a stiffness to my drawing, while arguably Irish dancing does compose of 'stiff' upper body movement, when watching actual dancers it is clear there is a lot of flow which I'm not sure I did justice to.

That being said, I do think I was able to convey the feeling of joy in my subjects, like how Joan Hill showed the feeling of concentration in her subjects. And the emotion of the piece is what I think is the most important aspect - since we both did this (I hope) because of love for our heritage and culture.