Elle Newman

After going to the Magic Realism exhibition I was inspired to look into watercolour, so I started looking into watercolour artists and found Silvia Pelissero otherwise known as Agnes Cecile. I really liked Pelissero’s work as she used watercolour to help convey emotions. Her normal style is to draw people and then to use bright watercolours over the top to illustrate emotion that may otherwise be hidden to the outside world.

I really think that this art style links to cancer very well as the colour to be used to highlight emotion and individuality, that what is on the outside doesn’t represent the person on the inside or take away their individuality. I felt inspired to try and see if I could create some inspired artwork based on Silvia Pelissero’s style with watercolour.

It took me a while to get used to watercolour as I haven’t used it for years, but after a few attempts, I was happy to start to try and create some art. I first took inspiration from Pelisero’s eyes and nose painting but as I’m awful at drawing noses I decided to add a mouth in to make it less horrific! I was pleased with the lip and eyebrow as I feel like it looks natural, but I wasn’t happy with the quality of the paints as they didn’t sit the way they were expected so I decided to go out and buy some better quality paints to see if that changed the outcome.

My second outcome was more similar to her face drawings, I drew a girl but then the back of her head turns into flowers. I first drew the drawing and then used bright colours over the flowers like Pelissero does. I then started to use a pen to outline the drawing but after starting to draw the flowers I started to not like the drawing so I stopped and left it, which I really like as I feel it really adds to the drawing.

Overall I really like this style and I really want to look at watercolour more to learn some more techniques and styles.