Marriage of Heaven and Hell image
I started this image many months ago. The inspiration for this work comes from many sources, including Italian Renaissance magic and William Blake. I inked the stems and leaves using black Micron fiber tip pens on A3 watercolor paper. Recently, I’ve been learning how to use a calligraphic fountain pen (a Lamy Joy) and realized that incorporating text on the stems might look appealing. Consequently, I wrote out excerpts from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake on the stems1. Initially, I hadn’t planned the stems with this purpose in mind, resulting in varying thicknesses, which is not ideal. However, I appreciate the effect and plan to explore this technique further in future works, possibly with ropes or vines of text. Here’s the final inking:
1 The The Marriage of Heaven and Hell By William Blake is a captivating work. It’s got some great lines in it, such as “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained” and “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom“.
The finished inking was too large to scan in one go, so I had to scan it four times at different orientations and then join the scans in Photoshop. This process resulted in slightly blurry line-work in some areas. I then imported the PSD file into Procreate and did the colouring on the iPad. Whilst I dislike doing inking or lettering on an iPad, it makes colouring a joy, and the resulting flat colour is perfect for the screen. Colouring is a nice activity to do on my morning commute.
Since most of my artworks are designed to be viewed on screens, this one was just too big - so in future I’m not going to do anything larger than A4 unless really necessary.
Here’s a detail of the finished work:
The final image was huge (over 10k pixels width) so I’ve downscaled it for display here.
The flames at the bottom was originally grass, but Blake inspired me to turn it into fire.
