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May 14, 2015

100 Watercolors #80 - Words

When the theme "Words" popped up, the first idea that I got excited about was reading.  I immediately thought of Aaron Renier's amazing poster No Book Ever Ends, which proudly hangs on the wall in my house that faces all of my bookshelves.  Then, somehow, that triggered a memory of an old Norman Rockwell cover for the Saturday Evening post, of a nerdy little kid reading a book, but in his imagination he's the brave knight from his story.  A quick image search turned up a few such images by Rockwell.  I really liked all these illustrations, but I was worried maybe I wouldn't be able to come up with something new for this idea, since it had been done (well!) a few times before.

leftmost image ©Aaron Renier - right two images ©Norman Rockwell

Then it struck me that all the readers in these illustrations were boys!  As soon as I decided on a little girl reading, the rest fell into place pretty quickly.  I tried to pick a few cool fictional characters and a few inspiring real-life ladies and then I used some reference from old Nancy Drew covers and a particularly blatant swipe of The Accolade by Edmund Leighton to finish things off.  I had a lot of fun building up the top half of the composition with successive layers of the same blue.  I'm pretty happy with the end result!


The next theme: Pen and Paper!

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