New watercolor piece complete! Just in time to give me a breather for the Thanksgiving holiday. This painting took a lot of work; half of the project was research! Our assignment was to illustrate a scene from an opera, and we were given a list of composers to choose from. After doing research on each of the composers, I narrowed it down to Richard Wagner, and then down to one of the plays in his Ring Cycle. I read the synopsis for each play, and then choose Die Valkyrie as the opera which I would choose a scene from. Then I had to watch the opera in German, and read the libretto so I would know what they were saying. I was difficult to pick out a scene that would be interesting to illustrate because the Opera, for the most part, is not performed in costume with horses and battles (I watched a few versions, and some have more costumes and action than others) So the exact positions and actions of the characters had to be described rather than demonstrated by the performers. I had to do a lot of research to determine what kind of clothing the norse gods wore, and what the setting in each scene might look like.
Finally, I decided to illustrate the scene where Wotan comes after Brunhilde for having disobeyed his orders. In the scene, Brunhilde has fled to Valkyrie rock to ask her sisters for shelter and aid in protecting Sieglinde. But then storm clouds appear and Wotan bursts out of them riding on his thunder horse. Yeah. Dramatic. I decided that the thunder horse needed to be white, and Wotan needed to be larger than Brunhilde in the picture, even though she is further in the foreground than he. These are gods we’re dealing with, so they can change their size at will, of course.
This painting was done in watercolors on cold press watercolor paper.
