I finally finished another painting – this time, an homage to both Mucha and gin! As someone who has only recently discovered how great a cold, refreshing gin and tonic at the end of a long day can feel, I wanted to honour this fabulous pairing.

I’m not actually that happy with a lot of this, however.

Obviously, I’m happy enough to post it here (frankly I’m just satisfied that it’s bloody finished, it’s taken a while!), but I am genuinely surprised that it’s turned out OK, because at the beginning (throughout the whole thing, actually) I came within a hair’s breadth of scrapping it – many, many times.

The skin and the shape of the arms didn’t really turn out how I wanted, and the face looks a shade too cartoon-y for my liking. There are other bits of it that I struggled with, such as the waistline of the dress and getting a uniform covering throughout (my new paints are definitely thinner than the old ones I used, not to mention more unpredictable colours compared to the shade on the tube!).

The hair is OK, but not my best. I did enjoy doing the “botanicals” bit at the bottom, though – using shades of yellow and brown and white for the lemon, browns and fawns for the nuts and spices, and attacking the lavender and juniper berries with a million shades of purple and blue. It was definitely fun, if nothing else, but for a lot of it, I only kept going because I didn’t want to quit (story of my life! haha).

As with a lot of my art, I often knew what I was working on wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but I didn’t know quite how to change it. I guess that’s what happens when you’re completely “self-taught” – which is, in my case,  a nice way of saying I HAVE NO BLOODY IDEA WHAT I’M DOING. And YET, considering how much I doubted it, I think it’s turned out OK.

And it’s about gin. Enough said.

ps. I realise the lemon is a political point. Entirely intentional. No lime in my G&Ts please, even if we’re only drinking Hendricks 😛