A book at bedtime adds to it

The painting I am currently working on has a mystical feel to it,  and I will continue to work towards it having a magical and ethereal feel within it. The subject matter is from nature although I will put a lot of artistic licence into the creatures that are depicted within it to make them look more magical. I am currently working on the background to it, and until that is fully and completely done I won’t start of the fun part which is the creatures themselves. I can’t wait until that part but know that the background has to be correct for the message within to be best illustrated.

So to that end am trying to keep the background to within a limited colour scheme that is currently pinks and golds. I say currently because as the picture evolves under my brushes I may find that a few more colours might have to be incorporated to give more depth to the painting. I didn’t choose just red and  yellow which would give me the secondary colour of orange, but a bluely pink which has a touch of purple in it, and gold which also has a hint of blue within it, so that gives me more depth of tones which will make it better to look at and keep it harmonious.

I know what effect I am trying to capture as the background and will continue until I am happy that depth has been created.

But it dawned on me late last night, after a lovely weekend spent with my man catching up sociably with good friends and relaxing over a glass or two, that there was something else that would help me get into the mindset of this painting in another, more subtle way. Maybe it was sitting outside in the spring sunshine, watery as it was, that inspired it.

I quickly found what I was looking for, and with a smile, turned to a book that I read as a child although the version of it that I currently have has stories in it that I don’t recall reading before, even when I was a lot younger. Some of them are very familiar though, and I shall be interested to read them and see how the stories relate to me now as an adult with a life of experience analysing the sometimes very dark messages they convey behind the obvious one only a child would see.

And even though I know that the subject matter that I am painting to my knowledge won’t appear within the stories, for some reason reading Grimms Fairy Tales feels exactly the right thing to be reading at the moment to get me into the right mindset……