Ophelia
These prints inspired by Pre-Raphaeliets paintings works by John William Waterhouse and the image of Ophelia. My goal was to combine the portrait of a sank woman, a swamp, mosquitos, and wildflowers. It was my challenge to enter the woman’s hands into a new pattern not making them look like a stump of dead limbs.
The first composition I made by a pencil, then transferred it to a computer and began to build a construction of a print. Directions of arms should form a rhomb, underscored by huge mosquitos. One of the hardest parts was to make a feeling that these hands belong to one person, even if you looking on it from a distance.
When I’ve finished working with the composition, I started to look for different wildflowers on the internet, because it’s hard to find it on the cold winter evening in St Petersburg. I wanted to use simple and a bit naive ones. Color tests displayed that because of excessively realism drawing, wildflowers look like classical paintings, too noisy and too tangled.
So I’ve decided to redraw lines to make flowers and leaves more stylised. It helped to go away from photorealistic to fantastic illustration. But in contrast, hands I made more realistic by leaving it in the same graphic style as flowers.
All in all, I made five different color schemes — a rich one with gold gobelin effect, and a few more classical and fairy ones.
These prints I made for the store of an Art Lebedev design studio, You can buy a hi-res of every color scheme in an Art. Lebedev pattern shop
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