Summer Woodland Fairy Arch

Cindy Liu

Digital painting drawn by hand using ProCreate for iPad. Shoutout to James Julier for the tutorial!

When I think of the word “craft,” it feels synonymous with freedom and discovery. I wanted to evoke the sense of peeling back one world–so familiar one might sleepwalk straight through it–to enter another that delights, enchants, and asks for curiosity and openness. A place that is simultaneously of our world, yet not quite. The magical realism of García Márquez, the sun-drenched hilltops of Attack on Titan, auroras skating across the night sky–these are images that flitted across my mind, and which I sought to emulate, while creating this painting. They kindle an inner peace and contentment that is impossible to put into words, but one I find myself always striving to find.

To paint this piece, I followed an excellent tutorial by James Julier. The painting primarily relies on the Rainforest brush, an easy way to hack a quasi-Seurat dapple effect. You can see examples of this on the forest floor and tree leaves enveloping the archway. I also tried to engender a feeling of arrival by experimenting with light and texture through Airbrushing brushes. As one’s eyes travel up to the archway, the textures take on greater clarity, and the light becomes more direct. I played around with opacity and smudging to create this optical illusion.

One of my favorite aspects to explore while working on this piece was the infinite possibilities of color. The lower half of the painting, for example, includes 12 different colors across the pathway, stones, and greenery snaking its way up the tree branches. Once mixed and layered, the colors assume a mirage effect, similar to that of stained glass, or a photo of water taken on an old film camera. They harmonize and blend, twist and turn, push and pull, until they become strange yet familiar versions of themselves. I realized that color itself is a form of craftsmanship, a way to elasticize the boundaries of my imagination.

To me, the ultimate realization of craft is the capacity to create a better, more hopeful world. I hope this piece, in some small way, allows us to dream towards one.