Visual style

Having selected a few potential topics for my first chart, I am working on the visual style.  Playing to my strengths and looking for a unique and personal approach, I intend to use watercolours to create paintings to illustrate my necessarily digital text.  I will share some of my inspiration in another post, but for now, it's time for experimentation.

I love the way that watercolour's natural variability adds a great deal of texture and life to a picture, especially when used delicately.  The way that the pigments within a colour separate and migrate on the paper, interacting with the texture and water is so variable the results are always unique.  I'm hoping I can produce something appealing.

I feel watercolours might work very well for most topics, and for the subject of heredity may be relatively straightforward, but for my first chart I have set myself rather a challenge (for a change).  I had thought to explore Mars, and am having some difficulty representing the sky at night in watercolour.  A quick google image search wasn't terribly helpful.  Thanks to having read and implemented quite a few watercolour tutorials in the past, my first few sketches using wax resist, alcohol and salt look quite interesting.  They're drying at the moment, so it's time to do a bit more research.

I want to initially explore Mars as a remote body in the night sky, before telescopes, and the attempts to track its motion and apply laws.  For this, I would like to embellish the image of the sky with tracks and equations, but of course subtlety and beauty are my goals here, so I need to take a lot of care.

Flight 2 by Stephanie Piu-Mun Law

For a long time I've been a fan of the technical sophistication of the work of Stephanie Pui-Mun Law.  In particular, the way in which her work incorporates delicate structures into subtly washed and textured backgrounds.

Moonbathing by Stephanie Piu-Mun Law

Luckily, Ms. Law has been generous enough to share on her blog the process of creating a recent and rather subtle example, entitled Moonbathing.  She discusses various techniques, and emphasises the importance of layering thin washes, with complete drying between.  It's a ludicrously hot day and I have a fan running, so hopefully that will speed things up a little.

Now I have a rough idea of what I want to say, I've storyboarded the points in the timeline I want to cover, it's time to write the script.  Then I'll sketch in more detail, and start the paintings.