Ni Vida, Ni Muerte

Thoughts

The woman in the painting is in the process of becoming a sugar skull—a symbolic change inspired by Día de los Muertos, hence the title Not Life, Not Death. I wanted to capture her emotional response to this transformation using her hands and face: the hands are tense, maybe fearful or angry; the face is shocked, confused. She’s caught mid-change, unsure of what she’s becoming. My previous painting, Seasons, is the calm before the change.

Transformation is something we all experience, often more slowly and subtly than we expect. We grow, we adapt, we shift. But when do we realise we’re changing? What if we never do? How do we describe that strange, uncertain state—being neither one thing nor the other? We have language for some stages of development—like “tween” or “puberty”—but for many other transitions, especially internal ones, we don’t. Take burnout, for example. It doesn’t happen in a single moment but that word describes a change of state. One day you just notice: you’re exhausted, cynical, no longer yourself. When did that shift occur? What was the tipping point?

When I think about transformation in my own life, I can’t help but connect it to mental health. This painting captures the moment of horrifying recognition—when you finally see what you’re becoming. The transformation is already in motion, out of your control. All she can do is watch. The colour that once might have represented vibrancy now overtakes her. She’s dissolving into something inert—one more painted skull among many. Her identity is fading beneath the surface.

Process

I found some canvas boards for sale very cheap, so I thought I could give this material a try. Usually, I shy away from canvas as it's so much more exposed - a sketchbook is easier to shut away. Seasons was also painted on canvas board.

I started off sketching out the figure. I knew I wanted to use a lot of colour so that means needing to repeat it all over the piece so it can stay both balanced and vibrant. I wanted to have a mixture of busy sugar skulls and more blocky colours of roses to make sure it wasn't too confusing for the eyes. I wanted to imply chaos so having the skulls at different angles without a lot of pattern was important for the message but I still wanted the composition to be aesthetically pleasing.

I blocked in skin tones using Copic markers, then started to shape the face using coloured pencils adding more subtle tones. The face is the only place that has pencil used in this way, the flesh tones elsewhere are achieved with Posca markers and charcoal. This is intentional, so the face can remain softer to contrast the aggressive colours. The process photos below show me working my way around the piece to fill in the sugar skulls, flowers and hair. Because I used the markers and not paint, it means the variation in the colours doesn't change too much which I like, it helps to add cohesion to the whole piece. The downside is that it took a long time to get the colours muted in the background to a point where they weren't distracting but balancing against them becoming muddy was a challenge.