Christmas of 2022 was approaching and I was running out of gift ideas for my family members. I decided to create a fun, colorful, and puzzle-like painting because I thought it would be fun for the family to share pieces of a whole. I sketched out a whimsical mushroom village with a fantastical sky and painted it with almost every color of the rainbow. It turned out super cute and it was a hit with the family! So much of a hit that my Aunt Cherry asked if I would do a commission of a similar theme.
I had not yet committed to being an artist at this point. I was still working on my skills and style - which are honestly going to be things I'm always working on, but now I have shifted to the mindset of being an artist. Although I wasn't too confident about accepting this project, she's everyone's favorite great-aunt. Who am I to decline a request made by Aunt Cherry?
I accepted. This is the summary of her request:
"I want you to create a piece for me and my retired friends who all used to work together at a school. We all love reading. Some of us are more into travel, others are more into history. I want you to make it so that we can each have a piece of the full painting"
"Simple enough," I thought. Yet I decided to put it off for about 10 months. Now it's crunch time and I must get to painting. I turned to Pinterest and searched "gifts for book worms", "travel aesthetics", "history buff art", and went down a few rabbit holes. I finally decided on a piece that highlighted travel, reading, and history. To represent travel, I decided the background would be a map. To represent reading, the foreground would be a set of books. To depict a "historical" theme, I took inspiration from the traditional vintage books when choosing colors and details for the book covers.
When I started the sketch, it was difficult for me to decide on what I thought would look good until I came to the conclusion that - to a reasonable extent - just about anything I came up with would be the "right answer". Initially my internal conflict was that the piece I create wouldn't be up to par with my aunts expectations. Then, I remembered that she chose me to do this commission for her because she loved my previous works and she knows how creative I am and trusts me with that process. If the person commissioning me trusts my creative abilities just based on the small portfolio I've shown people, shouldn't I be confident in my craft based on the large portfolio of works I've actually completed?
The answer is yes, btw.
Since my art style is more modern and simple than the styles I took inspiration from, I decided to use "my shapes" and color palette of the images I saw. Once the main structures and colors were in place, I started to add what I felt was missing. I liked the tan landmasses with the red border but there wasn't enough contrast in the water so I added a few darker shades of blue. I was initially going to outline the darkest blue in black but I decided to instead outline it in gold for an "antique" feel.
Pertaining to the books, initially I was going to put the two warm colors on the left and the cool colors on the right but after a moment of thought, I knew it would be better balanced with one on each side. Similarly, I was going to dedicate different metallic colors to each cover design, but decided that using only one metallic color (a mix of gold and silver), wouldn't take away any meaning and would make the process overall simpler to execute.
As I mentioned earlier the book cover designs were inspired by your stereotypical antique book aesthetics. I saw a lot of them depicting natural landscapes so I decided that a moon, tree, mountain range, and sun were all good bets. The middle is more my style. Although it doesn’t represent anything obvious, I think of it as a portal between the night on the left and day on the right. You can see little portals beside the tree and above the mountain as well!
I'm not sure if the recipients of these pieces will want to frame the canvases but I always assume a canvas will not be framed unless I specifically plan to do it myself. For this reason, I painted the borders with a shiny metallic gold and signed each right border "Chelsea Elizabeth - 2023"
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