'Magic in the Marshes'- January's subscription print breakdown (Patreon)

Hello! January's print has been shipped and is on it's way to all my Riso Subscription patrons who signed up before Dec 31st/paid on January 1st!

This print is inspired by the 3,000 year old and absolutely stunning Egyptian tomb painting 'Fowling in the Marshes,' which I first saw at the British Museum on my first trip to London. I love this piece, including all the history surrounding it. They don't even know where this tomb is locate because the grave robber who found it fell out of favor with the museums and died not sharing the location! Pretty nuts! That means somewhere there might be more paintings by this incredible artist. 

I have always loved the efficiency and stylization of Egyptian friezes and tomb paintings. In my high school art history class I would redraw and dissect the beautiful ways ancient Egyptians simplified complex shapes and ideas. Basically, I liked drawing birds and symbols around my notes and focused on the simple silhouettes with intricate patterns. 

I've always wanted to make a print that captures the magic of this painting, so this is my ode to 'Fowling in the Marshes'!!

I had a pretty rough time with the values on this print, I ended up making 4 iterations of it before making up my mind! I started with a very bright yellow border, lightened it up, switched up the values on the birds and then finally settled on a bright yellow again! It kind of came back around to the beginning but I couldn't have gotten there without the tweaks I'd made. 

The hieroglyphics behind Nebamun, the main focus in this painting, say that he is 'Enjoying himself and seeing beauty'. I love that, it's so simple and so pleasant, so I tried to keep this in mind while making this print. The main character enjoys the the life all around her, feeding the birds as she rocks gently among the lily pads and papyrus reeds. 

I also wanted to revisit an older print I'd done with lily pads where I flattened the top of the lily and made a decorative border with the circles. I've always loved that pattern so I wanted to adopt it here as well. 

I had to adjust the gradients quite a bit to get the perfect level of bright green framing the piece. I didn't want the border to be one color, and again referenced the old sword print to try and get that bright green again. 

Here are the sketches I started with! I love the profile of the Egyptian paintings so I started loosely with a profile, but ended up wanting her to be interacting with all of the birds around her instead. 

Originally, she had very bouncy hair, but the Egyptian wigs are so iconic, I really wanted to make the piece feel just as lively with a regal, patterned wig. 

One thing I focused on in this piece was creating interesting repeating patterns that felt like they had a lot of movement, even though they are pretty stiff. To do this I added flowing line patterns to every shape, without defining the silhouette much. 

And here's the final color, with all three inks mocked up digitally. This one was printed in fluorescent pink, blue and yellow so I create a group layer of each ink, add four opacities of layers in each group, set them all to multiply and then get to work filling them out!

The final ended up looking almost exactly like my mock up, I just needed to tweak a few things to get the values right with Riso. 

I love the grain touch of Riso prints so much, you can really see in this piece how Riso layers color by creating millions of tiny little dots. 

Of course, I had to add kitties.

Here's the breakdown of this piece- I'll attach it as well if you want to see it closer! This little chart shows you my colored values in my digital mock up vs my black and white values I actually send to the printer. 

Thanks so much, hope you enjoy January's print! February's dog tea party print is being finalized tomorrow, should have that shipped out to my Riso subscription patrons by Friday!

xx Natalie