February 9, 2008
I thought that you might get a kick out of seeing this piece. ‘True Thomas’ was a private commission from a ballad enthusiast who’s had very few stipulations except that I select my image from out of one of those same ballads. I choose a favorite scene out of a favorite Scottish border ballad, ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ wherein our hero first meets The Queen of Fair Elfand . She will then take him across the river of all the blood shed on earth into her fae kingdom and there Thomas will live for seven years. When he, at last, returns to this earth The Queen will have gifted him with a tongue that can only speak the truth, for good or ill. With Robin Williamson’s lovely version of the ballad playing on my CD I happily sat down at the drawing board and this image just flowed off my fingertips. Not something that happens very often but you wont catch me ever objecting when it does. A gift from The Kindly Ones as it were. Here’s my initial pencil drawing:
And then my inks. Here I tried out a dry brush technique using a hand made mixture of brown and black FW inks and a sable brush. At first I was only going to use this technique for Thomas’ cloak but it was working so well that I just kept on going over the whole surface. I liked how it came out quite a bit.
As I do with all my painted work ,I then I overlaid that with many, many layers of FW ink, diluted so that the colors were fairly transparent. This allows me to continually adjust the hue and saturation of my color pallet over the entire surface of the piece. These adjustments are completely instinctual, learned from many years of slapping paint down onto paper, as I have absolutely no knowledge of institutional color theory. Here is the completed image:
I choose to set the scene in that most magical and liminal time between sunset and dark. If you look hard enough, between the horse’s legs, the road they are about to take to fair Elfland can be seen, glimmering in the dusk.
Enjoy,
Charles









