A Sweet Faerie Child
I’ve met the sweetest Faerie imaginable.
StarJoy is the name of the above Faerie I painted as a present for an eight-year-old friend of mine. I feel blessed to have the ability to do an original painting for my young friend. I’m also grateful because the painting was a doorway for StarJoy to enter my life. I’m stunned (happily so) by this sweet-faced, Faerie child because she’s the most loving and gentle spirit that could possibly exist.
When I paint an “imaginary” portrait, I don’t usually see the face in my mind beforehand. The face emerges bit by bit, and I don’t get to see it entirely until my painting is complete. I don’t get to fully meet the spirit of the being until my painting of them is finished.
Faces I paint usually come from otherworldly realms, not from my imagination. … Well, my imagination is involved in ways. E.g., imagination plugs me into those realms.
Once this painting was finished, I was clearer than ever that fanciful beings I depict come not from my imagination but from Fey worlds. I mean, I was stunned by this particular piece of art for three reasons:
1) All of the face’s details and the way they integrate were so clearly not my doing. The same goes for her body.
2) This little girl’s demeanor is just so sweet and darling and gentle and kind, and is so sincerely all those things, that she’s shockingly—though delightfully—real to me.
3) That her image’s details and the integration of them weren’t from me, and represented a person as exceptionally wonderful as StarJoy, brought home the realization that she is real far more viscerally than would usually occur after I finish a painting, the realization hitting me like a sudden, majestic thunderstorm ringing with brilliant thunder.
I created two versions of StarJoy. The first has the night sky in the background and is at the top of this post. I printed that version for my eight-year-old friend to hang in her home.
I’ll also give her the second version. It has no background and is a jointed paper doll. Here she is under the protective branches of a tree–another of my paintings that is a jointed paper doll—along with a gnome I constructed by needle felting:
Here’s a quick video showing how the doll’s joints move:
If you want to see the vid again after it’s played, click the arrow that’s kind of circular.
Below is a brief time-lapse vid of my painting StarJoy from start to finish, except for her background. … Hm, I might’ve tweaked the figure a bit more after the video.
If the vid seems to pause, I’m probably painting tiny detail. You’ll know the vid has ended when my URL appears. My painting process was atypical because the artwork was intended to be made into a jointed paper doll.
Magic is in everything!
