1 in 4

Thoughts

I started off looking for references for female portraits, just kind of doodling and sketching. Often this is the case, I get inspired along the way as the piece is forming. I often use AI to generate references for me and in this case, it gave me images of women from a variety of ethnic background. I decided to limit my colours and sketch the women with a single pencil.

I started thinking about similarities and differences. If these women were real, what might their lives be like? Would their physical appearance play a large part in their identity? What makes us who we are? My mind often goes to darker places and it occurred to me that (threats of) violence and a powerlessness kind of links most women, as depressing as that is. The flecks of red and slightly sinister imagery of the snake were meant to bring that together, and then, of course, the disturbing statistic that 1 in 4 women experience sexual violence became the title. Having three women in this portrait was very purposeful, who is the fourth?

Process

As explained briefly above, I found reference imagery and used just one coloured pencil to draw each face.

As I went to paint in the background, my posca marker exploded and flicked red all over the page. I decided to lean into this and make it into a feature of the piece and it then gave it a more aggressive contradication to the women's expressions.

I used posca markers some more the sketch in the snakes, freehand, and without much thought. Finally, I added in some darker features on the faces using alcohol markers - this was mostly because I really disliked the yellow face. It lacked a lot of punch because tonal variation was very tricky with that colour choice.