Nursery Rhyme Art Project: Full Scale Sketch

I’m back to show you the next step in the art project I’ve been working on based on the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence”.  You can see the first two posts covering inspiration and preliminary sketches by clicking the links.

After working out my ideas in the small sketches I showed you last time, I made a large, full-scale sketch with my final ideas.  The goal was to get things just how I wanted them to look so I could see the ideas and also so that I could transfer the drawings to the board I was going to work on just as I had drawn them.  I also hoped to experiment with color in the full-scale sketch.  Let me show you:

Sing a song of sixpence

A pocketful of rye

 

Four and twenty blackbirds

Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened

The birds began to sing.

Wasn’t that a dainty gift

To set before the king?

(That outer ring is crown.)

You can see that by the end, I had taken out the words “Six Pence” and the extra grains of rye that were scattered about.  Since the audience for this work is children ages 0-2, the words seemed unnecessary, and the scattered rye took away from the more simplified, clean look that I was going for.

I got excited about color once I finished the drawing, but soon realized that doing just a quarter of the piece in color would help me figure out the colors that I needed.

It was a good thing I did this because I decided to change the crown in the outer circle to be more recognizable as a crown.  You can see both versions in the same sketch below.

Yay for color!  That’s how I almost always feel about color, actually.

Next up:  preparing the board and painting!