Teresa Wentzler Art

I’ve been drawing for years for another discipline (counted cross stitch designing with its limitations of the grid), and have some ideas that have either made it (or not) into needlework designs. Some of those, I’ve wanted to alter/do over with various tweaks or changes of format (other media).

Why re-visit older ideas? When I don’t feel I’ve given an idea my best shot, or explored it fully, I can’t truly let it go. Obsessive? Maybe. But for me, it’s part of the ‘creative process’, and as such, I can’t ignore it.

So, I’m digging through those ideas and playing around with composition, color ideas and just in general re-visiting things that I’ve wanted to change or update to give them a second life.

One of those ideas concerns the jolly main figure in this sampler design:

Much of my art tends to be illustrative. I like to create images that engage the viewer to imagine a story-line to go with it. So, I wanted to use the above figure in another setting, and make the drawing an illustration not tied to a (needlework) sampler format. The result was this drawing done several years ago as a portfolio piece for a children’s book writers and illustrators conference I attended:

While I liked the piece: the night-time atmosphere, most of the colors, and especially the interaction between the characters, the composition seemed somewhat lacking.

So, in the rough sketch below: Some horizontal and vertical space was added, giving the drawing some much-needed depth. Next, a change of woodland to mixed evergreen and deciduous trees, rather than a purely alpine forest. I like the ‘space’ the characters inhabit a lot better in this drawing. And finally, a bit more animal life (owl, fox, deer, etc.) seems appropriate and in keeping with what I visualize as a “cozier” scene. (Don’t worry that you can’t see them…they haven’t been finalized yet. ;-)) The challenge will be in not detracting from the interaction between the human characters with the addition of the extra details.

My go-to medium for illustration is pen and ink with watercolor tinting…I’m fairly sure that’s how this idea will eventually be executed.

So far, I like it. We’ll see how it goes.