What The Stars Saw
In November I somewhat unexpectedly ended up moving house on very short notice. For about two weeks I didn't pick up a paintbrush even once as I wrestled with boxes, hung curtains, and carried things up and down three flights of stairs in a narrow row home from 1901. I spent the other two weeks making this.
"What The Stars Saw" is my second giant conglomerate watercolor creation, and belongs with a sort of tiny story I wrote last autumn. I painted it in the little attic studio in my new house while listening to a Maggie O'Farrell audiobook, a tome about seabirds, and the entirety of A Gentleman in Moscow (fervently recommend!).
Without further ado, here's the painting and its story: 
Details
The painting for this one is so full of teeny details that I feel it's tough to fully enjoy it on a small screen, so I made sure to snap some detail shots of the component parts. I'm excited to share these with you now and to tell you a bit about what this piece means to me.
The Binoculars: I'm forever captivated by artistic work that blurs the boundaries of time and space, allowing me to step outside of my current location and moment and take in some sense of the ineffable cosmos. The most powerful and striking example I can think of is the poetry of W.S. Merwin, particularly his 1988 collection "The Rain in the Trees." In this piece, I wanted to lean into that energy, putting characters from across the ages of our planet's life into one spot. I struggled a lot with how to visually represent the observing stars from my story without making them a part of the scene, and ultimately settled on the basic lens shape of the binoculars as a framing device that would separate the viewing stars from the viewed world.
The Stone Circle: Megalithic standing stones fascinate me, and I wanted to depict them in a fashion that would evoke pre-historic humanity's connection to the earth and the sense of wonder and fear whereby they endowed the elements with faces, voices, and comforting or terrifying powers.
The Circle Dancers: Circle dances are one of the oldest-known dance formations and still appear in folk cultures all over the world. They are a vivid element of my childhood memories of growing up in a remote Turkish village on the Black Sea, and are a form of social connection more primordial and accessible than language. I wanted the circle-dancers in this piece to embody and represent the much bigger cosmic dance of galaxies and stars of which we are all, after all, a tiny part.
The Spire & The Fire: I think for all generations currently living, fire continues to be a powerful symbol of apocalyptic threats. From the decades of angst ushered in by the development of atomic weapons to the ever-increasing dangers posed by our warming climate, by now we can all perhaps say with Robert Frost that we hold with those who favor fire. In this piece, I wanted to depict fire in its various relationships to humanity, beginning as a core of consolation and warmth around which the primeval circle dances first began, and then expanding to become a devouring and destructive force devastating Hiroshima, eating up ancient rainforests, and ravaging the beloved medieval cathedral of Notre Dame.
There's so much more to share about this piece, but I must bring this section to a close now in order to show you some behind-the-scenes photos. If you have a specific question about something from the painting, please, please feel free to ask it in a comment on the post and I will be very happy to answer you directly!
The Process
I'm sure I've mentioned before that I always find the toughest part of any illustration project to be the very first stage—the part where I'm working out every detail of the composition from scratch using 2B pencils on cheap copy paper. For this piece, that stage was especially painstaking since so many different scenes needed to be threaded together. I spent about 30 hours just on that copy paper stage, and took these triumphant photos when I had wrapped it up and was ready to begin transferring the piece over to professional-grade watercolor paper:
And here you can see some photos of the linework rendered in pigment-rich red watercolor paint on the final sheet of paper—a 300gsm 100% cotton cut of hot-pressed Arches paper about 12x16 inches in size:
Once I begin painting a big, complex piece like this one, I find it very difficult to stop or get any rest until I'm finished. It's just too nerve-wracking not knowing whether I'll be able to pull of what I have in mind or whether I'll end up ruining the whole thing and throwing away a full-time work week due to an unforeseen catastrophe. I can do the linework in bits and pieces over the course of several weeks, but find it just too emotionally exhausting to stretch out the actual painting part. Here are the beginnings of that terrifying stage: color swatch card, early washes (with copious applications of masking fluid), and a little glimpse of my table easel set up in my new workspace.
And here is a selection of progress shots snapped throughout the days I spent painting this piece from morning until night. (There was one day during this week when I painted for nearly twelve hours with only one lunch break that lasted about forty-five minutes. 😅) You can see the colors slowly building here, and how I work all over the page rather than completing the painting one section at a time. This keeps me from giving in to the temptation to fiddle with still-wet areas before they've had a chance to thoroughly dry, and helps me to build values consistently throughout the piece.
And finally: the (mostly) finished piece before the tape peel, and after I removed the tape and brought in some darker outlines to make the circle-dancers pop out of the background a little more.
This piece was so rewarding to create, and I'm deeply grateful to my patrons over on Patreon for the monthly support that gives me that little bit of margin to help make tremendously time-consuming pieces like this one a possibility.
If you'd like to bring home your own version of "What The Stars Saw," you can find the original painting here and prints here.
Thanks for reading, friends.
All the best,
Bryana