Eldrid’s Escape
A gothic sanctuary under a starry, shadowed sky
Step into a haunting realm with ‘Eldrid’s Escape‘. This evocative, original illustration captures a mysterious castle, arching trees and a flying beast in the dead of night.
‘Eldrid’s Escape‘ contrasts stark gothic architecture with the wild beauty of barren boughs and serves as a captivating portal into a darker fae realm. Perfect for lovers of dark folklore, dragons and moody fairytale art.
The Inspiration
Anyone who knows me knows I love dragons and my living room is full of them, so if I can create images with dragons in them, I will.
The inspiration for this image came from seeing a similar idea online and wondering if I could create something dark and moody like that. Plus, I had had an idea in my head to paint something akin to this and frequently create watercolour background that are dark and moody, but as I am less confident with current level of watercolour painting skills I decided that I would give the background a go in inks and stamp elements on. And of course there had to be a dragon.
The Craft
The background for ‘Eldrid’s Escape’ is a combination of a purple, a sepia and a grey ink all blended and layered over each other whilst trying to leave some white space to give the impression of storm clouds.
I printed the castle and the trees about a third of the way up the card and then had to ground them. I knew I wanted I misty pool in front of the castle so I tried to shade a rough shape for this with the inks. The pool wasn’t coming together until I decide to add some bits of stones and twigs, which involved a lot of bits of scrap paper and strategic wiping off of ink from stamps. The sticks and stones seemed to help define the pool better so I darkened the ink around the pool. It still wasn’t quite working so I decided to work on the trees.
The trees were coloured with watercolour pencils and then dangling vines added and of course my dragon. However, the pool was still not right. I decided to use a white pastel pencil to lighten the pool up and then watered down some Dr Martin’s Bleed Proof white to swipe across the pool and the base of the trees. This finally gave me the effect I wanted. So after a little white posca pen stippling I finally got onto the card what was in my head.
